Art of Reading Scripture Quotes

“Scriptural interpretation is properly an ecclesial activity whose goal is to participate in the reality of which the text speaks by bending the knee to worship the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Through Scripture the church receives the good news of the inbreaking kingdom of God and, in turn, proclaims the message of reconciliation. Scripture is like a musical score that must be played or sung in order to be understood; therefore, the church interprets Scripture by forming communities of prayer, service, and faithful witness.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“Thus, while not all Scripture is generically narrative, it can reasonably be claimed that the story Scripture tells, from creation to new creation, is the unifying element that holds literature of other genres together with narrative in an intelligible whole.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“The problem was acutely described in 1909 in a penetrating essay by Adolf Schlatter: According to the sceptical position, it is true that the historian explains; he observes the New Testament neutrally. But in reality this is to begin at once with a determined struggle against it. The word with which the New Testament confronts us intends to be believed, and so rules out once and for all any sort of neutral treatment. As soon as the historian sets aside or brackets the question of faith, he is making his concern with the New Testament and his presentation of it into a radical and total polemic against it.... If he claims to be an observer, concerned solely with his object, then he is concealing what is really happening. As a matter of fact, he is always in possession of certain convictions, and these determine him not simply in the sense that his judgments derive from them, but also in that his perception and observation is molded by them.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Art of Reading Scripture

“The resurrection produces a “conversion of the imagination” that causes us to understand everything else differently.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“Proclaiming resurrection turns the world upside down (cf. Acts 17:1-9) and holds out to the poor and lowly the hope of being vindicated while posing a worrisome prospect to those who have already received their consolation in the present life (cf. Luke 6:24).”
― Ellen F. Davis, Art of Reading Scripture

“Whenever we pick up the Bible, read it, put it down, and say, “That’s just what I thought,” we are probably in trouble.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“Time, as we see it framing biblical narrative, is neither linear nor cyclical but perhaps more like a helix, and what it spirals around is the risen Christ.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“But is it not absurd to think of the Word as in any sense incarnate before the flesh existed, before Jesus was born? So that it could be the incarnate Word who spoke to Moses on the mountain or who cried out to his Father in many psalms? Or is it not absurd to think of the writing and collecting and reading and interpreting of the New Testament as this same Word’s actual speech to us, who, as the angel said, is not here but risen?”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“Scripture is not merely a record of divine-human history but a proclaiming of it, not merely an account of God’s life with us to date but a voice in that life. When we read Scripture in the church, someone addresses us. And by the unanimous tradition of the church, this voice is the Word of God, the Logos, the second identity of the Trinity.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“if we are not outside the story told by Scripture, we have no leverage for a certain kind of modernist reading. This is the kind that tries to salvage something from Scripture, from what we are likely to call, when engaged in this archaeology, the “scriptural tradition.” Reading this way, we start with some antecedent body of convictions — liberating experience or some branch of “theory” or the demands der deutschen Stunde or “what science tells us” — and then look in Scripture for what can be construed as coherent with that set of convictions. If we stood outside the story told by Scripture, we could perhaps do this; but since we stand inside the scriptural story, we are bound instead to work just the other way around, to salvage from other bodies of convictions what can be made coherent with Scripture. Indeed, much of what we can plausibly mean by saying that Scripture is “authoritative” is that we are not to read Scripture in this particular modernist way or in any of its premodern analogues.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“it cannot be the purpose of Scripture to provide us with certified information about some entity outside its story about us, whether that third entity be God or certain classical religious experiences or the theological history of Israel and the primal church or whatever. Since we and Scripture and what Scripture talks about are not external to one another, since Scripture tells a story about God and us that we are even now living, there is no position from which such exchanges could be conducted — perhaps not even God has such an Archimedean point. This observation kills two historically instantiated errors with one stone.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“What justifies specifically churchly exegesis of Scripture? Can church doctrine guide our reading? Why should it? Why should we interpret the story of Abraham and Isaac by the passion of Jesus? The answer is bluntly simple: What justifies churchly reading of Scripture is that there is no other way to read it, since “it” dissolves under other regimes. Thus a hermeneutical exhortation from this first perspective. Be entirely blatant and unabashed in reading Scripture for the church’s purposes and within the context of Christian faith and practice. Indeed, guide your reading by church doctrine. For if, say, the doctrine of Trinity and Matthew’s construal of the passion do not fit each other, then the church lost its diachronic self in the early fourth century at the latest, and the whole enterprise of Bible reading is moot. The question, after all, is not whether churchly reading of Scripture is justified; the question is, what could possibly justify any other?”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“If for some reason academics outside the church choose to study any or all of the pieces into which Scripture falls in their hands, they are of course at liberty to do so. They are even at liberty to take the whole canon, as this odd collection the Christians once put together, and investigate why the church might have done that, what arbitrary sense she might have been imposing on the collected bits. And the church may happily receive any and all insights such investigations stumble across or information they make available. But such activity is not and cannot be exegesis of texts from the volume we call the Bible.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“For outside the church, no such entity as the Christian Bible has any reason to exist. It is not merely that exegesis of the Bible is likely to be mistaken in one way or another when done outside the church; interpretation of the Bible outside the church must be arbitrary, uncontrollable, and finally moot.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“The most positive outcome I know to such a friendship is the recognition that we do not have to figure out which one of us is wrong; indeed, that concept may not even apply. By ordinary logic, if two people or groups disagree, then one is wrong — or it is all relative and does not much matter anyway. But the basis for both disagreement and friendship is something that is neither strictly logical nor entirely relative. Rather, the basis for theological friendship between Christians and Jews is a mystery — the word Paul rightly uses (Rom 11:25; cf. 11:33) as he struggles with this most painful new fact of salvation history, the separation of Jews and Gentiles within the household of Israel’s faith. The mystery has only deepened over time, as the two communities have over a period of two thousand years sustained an allegiance to the God to whom Israel’s Scriptures bear witness, and likewise have experienced the faithfulness of that God to them. This prolonged duality is something neither Paul nor anyone else in the first century anticipated. At the very least, it should caution us all to modesty in our theological assertions.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“bad biblical interpretation proceeds not just from ignorance but from sin.36 Therefore, part of the hermeneutical challenge to contemporary Christians is to repent of our millennia-long hardness of heart.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“the impression that many seminarians seem to take from their introductory Bible course, that a given text is a puzzle with only one solution — an impression that often makes biblical study oppressive rather than exhilarating.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“The danger of Christians reading the Bible confessionally is that we run the risk of reading alone.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“What does this focus on revelation within the Old Testament signify for a “good reading” of the New Testament? Here is one possibility: Adequate apprehension of the gospel requires that we amplify our vocabulary for talking about God beyond the firm but (sadly) hackneyed truth that God is Love. The Old Testament establishes with equal firmness, in Leviticus and again in “the evangelical Prophet” Isaiah, that God is holy, an affirmation that underlies the first petition of the prayer our Lord taught the disciples. In both Torah and Prophets, it is clear that the proper response to God’s holiness is human obedience. Surely Jesus’ own submission to death on a cross is just such an obedient response to God’s holiness. We have been saved through grace — this is often the first affirmation we make as Christians awakening to the wonder of the life we share with God. But if the fruits of salvation are to be evidenced in the world, then the affirmation of salvation needs to be followed by the question, What form of obedience does Christian discipleship now require?”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“From a biblical perspective, salvation is a subcategory of revelation — or better, salvation is a consequence of revelation fully received.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“Garrett Green has argued persuasively that in many instances the biblical term “heart” ( , lev; καρδία, kardia) refers to what we call imagination.14 This notion wonderfully illuminates the use of that word in the eucharistic liturgy: “Lift up your hearts” — lift up your imaginations, open them toward God. Yet an aroused imagination is not in itself a holy state, for the “heart” can be healthy or perverted.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“In brief, teaching Christians to read the Bible confessionally means equipping them to do three things: to read with a primarily theological interest ; to read with openness to repentance; and to read with an understanding of the Old Testament witness to Christ.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“At this point it may be helpful to remember the distinction that the narratologist Gérard Genette makes between story and narrative.46 A literary narrative may differ in many ways from the story it tells (regardless of whether the story is construed as fictional or true). For example, the order in which events are narrated may differ from the order in which they occur in the story. A narrative need not tell all the events of the story, while it may recount some events a number of times — from different points of view (whether of characters or narrators), from different temporal junctures within the story, conveying different information, highlighting different aspects of significance. This important distinction between story and narrative may help us see that the plurality of narratives in Scripture — many of which recount the same events differently and none of which tells the whole story — is not in principle an obstacle to seeking in the Bible a single coherent story, which all the narratives together tell and each partially tells.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“What gives a liturgy its plot? A liturgy is always a sort of drama, that is, an intentional sequence of events, however simple or simply done, that has a plot.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture