Brian Blount calls for attention to the
"Living Word," which is never the "last word"
by Doug King
11-14-00
In the third major address to the Covenant Network
gathering in Pittsburgh, on
Saturday November 4, Brian Blount, Associate Professor of New Testament
at Princeton Theological Seminary, urged his audience to respect the
difference between God's living Spirit, which is a constant, and human
experience and thought, which are always changing and always rooted in
particular contexts.
We humans are "wired for God," he said --
open to the presence and word of God, especially when "God's
whisper takes on flesh" in the biblical texts. But the texts are
always given in particular situations, and only by understanding those
contexts can we discern which biblical words can really live for us
today.
Yet our temptation is to settle for simpler messages
-- "Do this, don't do that." We want absolutes, clarity,
finality. We want, in other words, to reduce the living Word of God to
"a last word (which) cannot breathe, it cannot live." And so
we turn the Word of God into a literary artifact. Yet nothing that is
living is ever "last." He went on to add that "even death
is not the last word, because God is a God of the living."
Pointing to the experience of the African-American
slave community, Blount cited the experience of Howard Thurman, once
dean of the chapel at Howard University and later at Harvard. Thurman
tells of reading the Bible to his grandmother, who could neither read
nor write. He asked her once why she wouldn't let him read from Paul's
letters. It was, she explained, because long ago her master held
religious services for his slaves, and often read Paul's words,
"Slaves, obey your masters." She had promised a friend that if
she ever learned to read, she would never read Paul.
A "last word," commented Blount, would not
allow such choices, but a living Word invites such treatment. It is, he
implied, not because the words are not true, but because they are not
true for particular people in their particular situations.
The writers of the New Testament did the same thing,
he added. They read the Psalms on the kingship; of David as pointing to
the kingship of Christ -- reading the old words for their new context.
And Paul, dealing with divorce in I Corinthians 7:10-15, even goes so
far as to go beyond Jesus' own condemnation of divorce to offer a living
word of advice that one who is married to a pagan might well need to
separate -- divorce!
So today as we deal with homosexuality, he said, we
need to acknowledge that there are words in the New Testament that
condemn it. But the context shaped those words of Paul, who saw
homosexuality, like all sex, as a matter of individual sex acts, chosen
by the person, who was driven by dehumanizing lust. And it was the lust
that was the real problem. Paul followed the views of his culture, then,
seeing sexuality as rooted in lust, and as meant for the sole purpose of
procreation.
Yet Paul did break from his culture in some ways,
particularly as he challenged the Jewish notion that inclusion among the
people of God could come only through adherence to God's law. So he came
to his radical countercultural statement in Galatians 3:28, that in
Christ all secular categories (slave and free, male and female, Gentile
or Jew) have been transcended. Even categories establish by God in
creation are now rendered irrelevant; all people are equally included in
God's people, and are to be treated equally. "This is Paul's living
word," he concluded.
The continuing process of interpreting and
re-interpreting the living word is difficult. There's an appealing
simplicity about taking every biblical word as "the last
word." But Blount quoted a line from the character played by Tom
Hanks in "A League of Our Own." When one of his players
complained that playing baseball was too hard, he answered her,
"It's baseball. It's supposed to be hard. If it weren't hard, then
everyone would do it."
It's easy to tell women to sit down and be quiet in
church. It's hard to struggle with the living word, seeing it afresh in
our own changing situations. But to those who are reluctant to engage in
such hard work we should respond that we are not taking away their
faith, but inviting them into a living faith.
He concluded, "This is how the first Christians
did faith, aggressively using it to interpret, not just recite their
traditions. ... Because the biblical words are not the Last Word. They
are the Living Word."
