Reading Past the Lens You Were Formed In

A Vela Essay — DRAFT

Slug: reading-past-the-lens Series: Reframing Christianity / Developmental Theology Arc (essay 5 of 7 — practical hermeneutics) Essay type: historical_argument Published at: DRAFT — pending Mike's review Meta title: Reading Past the Lens You Were Formed In | Vela Meta description: You were told there is one legitimate way to read the text — the plain one, the literal one, the one you were handed. There is not. What the words meant in their own language, the situation they were written into, and the reading-tradition you carry to them all decide what you find. Here is a method for reading more carefully, and a man who used it.

You were probably told there was one right way to read it. The plain way. The way that did not need a seminary or a Greek dictionary or a special theory — the way a sincere person reads a clear book and does what it says. You were told that the careful readings, the historical readings, the readings that asked what a word meant in its own century, were evasions: clever people talking their way out of a text that was trying to tell them something simple. And so when you hit a passage that frightened you, or shamed you, or asked of you something you could not give, you had nowhere to stand. There was the text, and there was you, and there was only one way to put them together.

That is the thing that was not true.

It was not a lie, exactly. The people who told you read the way they had been taught to read, and they believed the reading was the text rather than a reading of it, because no one had ever shown them the difference. But the difference is real, and it is older than the argument you were handed, and once you can see it you cannot lose it again. A passage of scripture does not have a single legitimate reading sitting inside it like a stone inside a fruit. It has words that meant something in a particular language at a particular time, it has a situation it was first spoken into, and it has the long line of readers who have carried it since — and which of those readers you happen to be standing in line behind decides, more than you know, what you find when you look.

This is not an argument for reading the text loosely. It is an argument for reading it more carefully than you were taught to. The literalist was not too rigorous. He was not rigorous enough — he stopped at the first reading available to him and called it the only one.

The lens you did not choose

Begin with a fact about your own eyes. You did not choose the lens you read through. It was ground for you, long before you could evaluate it, by the people who loved you and the tradition that formed them, and it works the way a good lens works: invisibly. You do not see your lens when you read. You see the text, clarified by it, and the clarity feels like the text's own.

Pete Enns, who teaches biblical studies and spent the first half of his career inside the frame and the second half describing his way out of it, named the move the frame makes. The Bible, he argues, was never the rulebook the frame treats it as. "Like that of the biblical writers themselves," he writes, "our sacred responsibility is to engage faithfully and seriously enough the stories of the past in order to faithfully and seriously reimagine God in our present moment. The Bible doesn't end that process of reimagination. It promotes it."¹

Sit with how strange that is against what you were taught. You were handed the text as a finished instruction — a thing to obey, not a thing to read. Enns is describing a text whose own writers were doing the opposite of obeying a fixed instruction: they were taking what they had received and re-reading it for a situation it had not been written for, and the book is the record of them doing it. If that is what the writers were doing, then a reader who freezes the text into a single plain meaning is not being more faithful than they were. He is being less faithful — he has stopped doing the thing the text models.

The reason this matters to you, specifically, is that the lens you were given was not neutral about your body, your desire, your failures, your worth. It was a particular lens, with a particular history, and it brought a particular set of answers to every passage before you ever opened the book. When you read a verse about purity and felt the floor drop, you were not meeting the text. You were meeting the text through the lens, and the lens did most of the work, and you mistook its verdict for God's.

So the first move is not to read better. It is to notice that you are reading through something. After that, the reading can begin.

Three questions

Here is a method you can actually use. It is not a theory of interpretation; it is three questions you can hold in your hand when a passage stops you, and they go in order, because the order is part of the method.

First: what did the words mean, in their own language, in their own time? Not what they mean in English, in your century, in the translation you grew up holding. The texts were written in Hebrew and Greek, by people inside worlds that were not yours, using words whose weight has shifted under two thousand years of use. A word like salvation did not mean to a first-century reader what it means in a contemporary American church. A word like sin carried a different freight. Before you can ask what a passage requires of you, you have to ask what it was saying to the people who first heard it — because if you read a first-century word with a twenty-first-century meaning, you are not reading the text. You are reading your formation, in the text's clothes.

Second: which reading-tradition am I bringing to this? You are not the first person to read this passage. Between you and the text stand centuries of readers who decided what it meant, fought over what it meant, and passed down their decision as if it were simply the text speaking. You inherited one of those decisions. You did not inherit the others. So when a reading feels obvious — when it feels like what the verse says — that feeling is not evidence that you have reached the bottom of the text. It is evidence that you have reached the bottom of your tradition's reading of it, which is a different and much shallower floor.

Third: what other readings have serious people held? This is the question the frame most wanted to keep from you, because it is the one that breaks the frame's monopoly. The readings you were taught to dismiss as evasions were not, most of them, the work of people trying to escape the text. They were the work of people who took the text with deadly seriousness and arrived, through careful labor, somewhere other than where you were told the only serious readers arrive. You do not have to agree with them. But you are entitled to know they exist — that the line of serious, devoted, rigorous readers does not all stand where your formation stood, and never has.

These three questions do not tell you what to believe. They are not a new set of answers to replace the old ones. They are a way of slowing down at the exact moment your formation wants you to speed up — the moment a passage delivers its verdict and your body accepts it before your mind has asked a single question. The method puts the questions back. What you do after that is yours.

The first question, at work

Take the first question and watch it do something.

When N. T. Wright reads Paul on the death of Jesus, he reads against the grain of a thing most modern readers assume the text is about. The frame reads Paul as explaining how an individual sinner escapes hell and gets to heaven. Wright's claim is that this reading imports a goal Paul did not have. "Like any exposition of Paul," he writes, "this one will fail unless it looks beyond the normal 'goal' ('escaping hell' or 'going to heaven') to the goal that Paul himself had in mind: that in the 'covenant of vocation' humans who found salvation in Jesus the Messiah would become active participants, free from the lure and drag of the dark forces that had previously prevented this, within the work of new creation here and now."²

Notice what the first question does to a familiar verse here. If you read Paul's word for salvation as "going to heaven when I die," then every passage about it is a passage about your private posthumous destination, and the urgency is the urgency of a soul under threat. If you read the same word the way Wright argues a first-century reader would have — as rescue into a vocation, a being-set-free to take part in the world's repair, here, now — then the same passages are about something else entirely. The Greek did not change. Your formation did. The first question is what lets you see that the meaning you "found" in the word was a meaning you brought.

This is not a soft reading. Wright is one of the most rigorous defenders of historic Christianity alive, and the reading is harder, not easier, than the one the frame gave you — it asks more of the words, not less. That is the point worth holding against the accusation you absorbed. Asking what the words meant in their own time is not a way of wriggling out of the text. It is the most demanding thing you can ask of it.

The second question, at work

Now the second. Watch a reading-tradition become visible — watch it stop being the text and become a choice that someone made.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, reading Paul, find not one Paul in the New Testament but three, and the three do not agree. There is the radical Paul of the letters scholars are confident he wrote himself; there is a more cautious Paul of the letters written in his name after his death; and there is a reactionary Paul of the latest letters, who reverses the first Paul on the things that mattered most. "They represent," Borg and Crossan write of the later letters, "a taming of Paul, a domestication of Paul's passion to the normalcy of the Roman imperial world in which he and his followers lived."³

The detail that should stop you is what happened to salvation in the hands of one particular reading-tradition. Borg and Crossan trace it. For Luther, they note, Paul's gospel was "radical grace, unconditional grace — grace without conditions," a release from the exhausting effort to be right with God. But that release did not survive its own success. "For other Protestants, including even many descendants of Luther," they write, "Paul's theology has been understood not as the abolition of requirements, but as the new requirement — namely, believing his theology is what we must do in order to be saved. In its Lutheran form, despite the emphasis upon God's grace, 'justification by grace through faith' was heard as 'justification by faith' and thus as involving a fearful form of works righteousness: the 'work' was 'to believe.'"⁴

Read that slowly, because it may be a description of the room you grew up in. A message that began as you are accepted as you are curdled, over generations of one reading-tradition, into you are accepted if you believe the correct things correctly enough — and the believing became a performance you could fail, which means the grace became a test, which means the thing that was supposed to end your fear became its source. That is not the text. That is one tradition's reading of the text, hardening across five centuries until it felt like the text. The second question is what lets you pry them apart. The reading you inherited had a history. Histories can be examined. What can be examined can be, at last, set down.

The third question — and a man who answered it

The third question is the one the frame fears, so it deserves more than an argument. It deserves a witness.

In 1879, at the height of his fame, having written the two novels that made him the most celebrated author alive, Leo Tolstoy stopped. He could not see what his life was for. He had wealth, family, genius, and the regard of the world, and none of it answered the only question that had come to matter — what is the meaning of a life that death ends? — and the absence of an answer brought him, by his own account, to the edge of suicide. He went looking. He went to the science of his day and found it silent on the question. He went to the philosophers and found them eloquent and empty. And then he did something a serious man in his position was not supposed to do: he went back to the Gospels, and he read them as if his life depended on getting them right, which it did.

What he found there was not what his church had told him was there. Tolstoy came to believe that the institutional church had buried the actual teaching of Jesus under centuries of doctrine and ritual and miracle, and that the teaching itself — read plainly, in its own words, stripped of the supernatural machinery laid over it — was a practical instruction for how to live. He did the work himself. He learned enough Greek to argue with the translations. He harmonized the four Gospels into a single account, cutting what he judged to be later accretion, keeping what he judged to be the core. And he reduced the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount to a handful of commandments he thought a person could actually obey.

The center of it, for Tolstoy, was a single sentence he believed the church had spent eighteen centuries explaining away. "Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," he quotes, "but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil; but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." And then his gloss: "That means, do not injure those who act in a way you disapprove of."⁵ Where his tradition had read the verse as a counsel of inner attitude, compatible with armies and courts and the whole apparatus of returned violence, Tolstoy read it as a literal rule — and built from it a doctrine of nonresistance that would, decades later, reach Gandhi, and through Gandhi reach the American movement that read Tolstoy reading Jesus and turned the reading into a force that moved a nation.

You may think Tolstoy was wrong. Serious Christians have thought so; the literal nonresistance he derived is contested ground, and the supernatural he stripped away is, for most of the tradition, not decoration but the thing itself. But look at what he was doing, because that is the witness. He was not a man fleeing the text. He was a man who took the text more seriously than the people who told him there was only one way to read it. "Awful as it may seem to say so," he wrote, "I sometimes think that if the doctrine of Christ, with the Church teaching that has become a part of it, had never existed, those who now call themselves Christians would be nearer than they are now to the doctrine of Christ."⁶ That is not the sentence of a man dismissing scripture. It is the sentence of a man who believed the text had been hidden by the very tradition that claimed to guard it, and who went looking for it underneath.

And what he found underneath was not condemnation. Read against the formation you carry, this is the part that matters most. Tolstoy's whole reading turns on a refusal of the very move purity culture runs — the move that makes the text a verdict on whether you are good enough to be saved later, somewhere else. He thought that move was itself the misreading. "They fancied," he wrote of the people who held it, "that the Teacher condemned their life... and promised them another and better life, in some other place. Whereupon they concluded that the farm was but an inn, and that it was not worth while trying to live well in it; and that the only thing necessary was to endeavor not to lose the good life promised to them elsewhere."⁷ The whole architecture of be good now to be rewarded later he read as a diversion from what the teaching actually asked, which was that you stop ruining your own life and live, here, with the people you are actually among.

This is the existence proof the frame did not want you to have. It is possible to take the Gospels with total seriousness — to learn the languages, to do the textual work, to stake your life on getting them right — and to arrive somewhere other than where you were told the only serious readers arrive. Tolstoy did not become a Bible-rejecter; he became, if anything, more bent on the text than the church that excommunicated him for it. He did not become a clever skeptic talking his way out; he gave away his copyrights and tried to live the Sermon on the Mount literally enough that it cost him his marriage and his peace. He is the proof that the third question is not an exit from faith. It is a door further in.

What this does and does not give you

The method does not hand you Tolstoy's conclusions. You are not being told to strip the supernatural, or to read nonresistance literally, or to follow any reader to any particular place. Tolstoy is here as a demonstration of the questions at work, not as a destination — a man who asked what the words meant, saw which tradition he had been handed, went looking for the other readings serious people had held, and did the labor himself. That you can do. Where it takes you is not for this essay to say.

What the method gives you is smaller and more durable than a conclusion. It gives you back the moment of reading. The frame's deepest injury was not any single doctrine; it was the theft of that moment — the second between the text and your assent, the second in which a person is supposed to be able to ask a question. Purity culture closed that second. The verse arrived, the verdict arrived with it, and your body accepted the verdict before your mind was permitted to speak. The three questions are how you get the second back. What did the words mean. Which tradition am I standing in. Who else, in good faith, has read this differently. None of them tells you what to conclude. All of them restore the pause in which concluding becomes, again, your own act.

Joseph Campbell, asked once whether reading the resurrection as metaphor undermined the Christian who reads it as fact, gave an answer that turns out to be about reading itself. "That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol," he said. "That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation."⁸ You do not have to take Campbell's reading either — many serious Christians read the resurrection as fact and have careful reasons. But notice the shape of what he is saying, because it is the shape of everything this essay has tried to give you: the same words admit more than one kind of reading, and which kind you bring decides what you find, and the reader who knows only one kind has not reached the bottom of the text — he has only reached the bottom of his own way of reading it.

You were told there was one legitimate way to read it. There was never one. There were the words in their own language, and the world they were spoken into, and the long line of readers who came before you, and the lens that line ground for your eyes before you could see it grinding. Knowing that is not the loss of the text. It is the beginning of being able to read it — slowly, with the questions back in your hands, standing where you can finally see that you are standing somewhere, and free, for the first time, to take a step.

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Peter Enns, How the Bible Actually Works (HarperOne, 2019), on the Bible as a model of faithful reimagination rather than a fixed rulebook (corpus passage HBA00-RC-064). The book's full subtitle states the thesis directly: In Which I Explain How an Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers — and Why That's Great News. Enns's related framing — that grace is found "by taking the Bible seriously enough to accept the challenge of wisdom," and that "God is not a helicopter parent" — is at HBA00-RC-155. ↩

2. N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began (HarperOne, 2016), on the goal of Paul's gospel as participation in new creation rather than escape to heaven (corpus passage DRW-RC-174). Wright develops the same argument at book length in Surprised by Hope (2007) and How God Became King (2012), both in corpus. ↩

3. Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul (HarperOne, 2009), distinguishing the radical Paul of the genuine letters from the conservative and reactionary "Pauls" of the later letters written in his name (corpus passage TFP-RC-010). Borg's "earlier paradigm / emerging paradigm" vocabulary, developed in The Heart of Christianity and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, is the larger frame; the "radical / domesticated Paul" distinction quoted here is its application to Paul specifically, and is the version available in corpus. ↩

4. Borg and Crossan, The First Paul (corpus passage TFP-RC-005), tracing how Luther's "radical grace" hardened, across the Protestant reading-tradition that followed him, into a new requirement — "the 'work' was 'to believe.'" The authors' stated aim in the same passage is "to get Paul out of the Reformation world and back into the Roman world." ↩

5. Leo Tolstoy, The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (anthology, 2016 ed.), gathering A Confession, What I Believe, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, and related works; the "Resist not him that is evil" reading and its gloss are at corpus passage TOL-RC-013. The non-resistance doctrine Tolstoy derives here is the seed of the Tolstoy → Gandhi → King lineage. ↩

6. Tolstoy, Spiritual Works (corpus passage TOL-RC-409), on the church teaching obscuring the doctrine of Christ. ↩

7. Tolstoy, Spiritual Works (corpus passage TOL-RC-383), the parable of the farm and the inn — Tolstoy's reading of how the afterlife-reward frame diverts readers from the teaching's actual demand. (See also TOL-RC-379 on "the doctrine of Christ concerning the son of man," where Tolstoy lays out the reading method that strips the supernatural to recover a practical ethics; and TOL-RC-448, his credo, "I believe that the only true purpose of my life is to live up to the light that is in me.") ↩

8. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers, Doubleday, 1988), on reading a religious symbol "in terms of poetry" rather than "in terms of prose" (corpus passage PMJC-RC-099). (The earlier draft footnoted this as PMJC-RC-068; the verified source_book_code location of the "mistake in the reading of the symbol … prose instead of … poetry … denotation instead of … connotation" exchange is PMJC-RC-099. PMJC-RC-068 in the live DB is a different Campbell passage — the swimming-pool / "Is there a God?" exchange — and was a transcription error corrected in the ASN-1266 coherence pass.) Campbell's reading of Christianity as one mythology among many is not dismissive in his own framing; it locates the resurrection inside what he takes to be the deepest register of meaning, not outside meaning altogether — a distinction the capstone essay of this arc (essay 7) develops at length. ↩