On becoming teachable
Thoughts on Scripture, receptivity, and mastery with help from John Calvin
In the introduction to his Psalms commentary, John Calvin gives us a rare look how he became a Protestant. Unlike, say, Luther, who in the introduction to his 1545 Latin works gives us the famous account of his evangelical breakthrough while reading Romans 1, Calvin tends towards reticence in describing his interior life. But here Calvin gives us some hints. He writes that even while he was still “obstinately devoted to the superstitions of Popery…God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought [his] mind to a teachable frame.” Note well: conversion, for Calvin, is all about becoming teachable. It is about assuming an attitude of grateful, reverent receptivity directed towards God. In framing conversion this way, Calvin closely links the place of knowledge of God and piety towards God in the Christian life, for becoming teachable isn’t just about an intellectual capacity to learn but also a posture of the will and affections towards God.
This sort of teachability, Calvin thinks, requires an attitude of reverence not only towards God but also towards the instruments God uses to reveal himself to us, which for Calvin primarily means the Scripture and the church. Thus in his commentary on 2 Timothy, Calvin writes that because Scripture is divinely inspired, “it is beyond all controversy that men ought to receive it with reverence.” “This is a principle which distinguishes our religion from all others,” he writes, “that we know that God hath spoken to us.” Similarly, God has chosen not to grant faith and build us up to maturity in Christ by direct, immediate supernatural power – although he certainly could do so! Rather, he chooses instead to use the visible church to do so. As he puts it in the Institutes at the beginning of Book IV, “among the many excellent gifts with which God has adorned the human race, it is a singular privilege that he deigns to consecrate to himself the mouths and tongues of men in order that his voice may resound in them. Let us accordingly not in turn dislike to embrace obediently the doctrine of salvation put forth by his command and by his own mouth.”
I’ve been thinking lately about what Calvin says about this posture of teachability – of reverence and honour mixed with expectation that God really is speaking through the words of Scripture and of his preachers. I’ve been reflecting upon it because I fear that one of the moral failings of the mainline church at this moment, and perhaps especially of its clergy, is the loss of the sense that such teachability is even something to which we ought to aspire.
I think this is particularly evident in our attitude towards Scripture. To talk specifically about my own tradition, every Episcopal priest solemnly swears at ordination that they believe Scripture to be the Word of God. Yet I fear that far too often, we claim mastery over Scripture rather than seeking to be teachable by it. Rather than trusting and expecting that Scripture is God’s speech to us, listening with alacrity and attention to what God has to say, we prefer to dissect it, divide it, poke around in it as something dead, powerless, and subject to our own intellectual gaze.
To be fair to us clergy, this is quite often what we are taught to do in seminary. The problem is not the historical-critical method per se. The idea that there is a complicated process of recension behind many of the Biblical texts need not be a challenge to their authority. But historical criticism can carry with it a posture of what Willie Jennings in After Whiteness calls mastery, a sense that the historical critic can stand over and above the Bible as judge, that it is controlled, contained, fully categorized and understood by the scholar. It’s this sort of posture, I think, that leads to (for example) me being told on first day of my Old Testament survey class in seminary that the goal of the course was to demonstrate to us that the Biblical text was useless for ethical and theological reasoning.1 This is not seeking to be taught by Scripture. It’s – quite openly! – dismissing Scripture as a teacher, making it at most a ventriloquist’s dummy for one’s own projects and desires or simply dismissing it entirely as a hopelessly morally compromised, contradictory ancient text.
And so, you get sermons that depend less on Scriptural authority than the individual religious experience of the preacher – or even explicitly contradicting the appointed texts (I’ll never forget a sermon that I once heard on John 14:6, the point of which was that there were in fact many truths, many ways to God). You get churches authorizing prayers that ascribe Biblical depictions of Satan’s activity to God and delegates laughing off objections.2 You’ll get incredulity at the idea that Scripture ought to norm how we speak about God.3 After all, if the Bible is just a disjointed collection of morally-backwards ancient peoples’ thoughts about and experiences of God (or “the divine”), why should what it has to say be normative?
The point is not that there are no difficult texts in the Bible. Nor is it to counsel wooden literalism in Scriptural interpretation. But it is to say that we preachers are called to be servants of the Word and not masters of it, that all of us Christians are called to be teachable by the Scriptures. We are called to attend to them expecting that God is speaking to us through them by the power of the Holy Spirit, that they are a key means he has given us for uniting us to him.
One of the ways, incidentally, that has been most helpful for me in helping me submit to being taught by the Bible is the daily office, especially using the older, fuller daily lectionaries. In them, you encounter the text of Scripture not in the context of study but in the context of prayer. The hearing or reading of the Bible isn’t followed by a sermon (which may or may not involve attempting mastery over the text) but by canticles of praise to God for his redeeming work. The text comes to you as something not first and foremost to be analyzed or argued over but simply received as a gift, a good gift from God. I think this is a good practice for all of us, but perhaps especially for us preachers, whose God-ordained work of exegeting Scripture and interpreting it for our people so easily tempts us to a posture of mastery over it. It reminds us that Scripture is not ours but God’s.
I think a lot about the conclusion of Cranmer’s “A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture,” the first of the Homilies, which I think lays out well the sort of attitude Christians should have towards the Bible:
Thus we have briefly touched some part of the commodities of God’s holy Word, which is one of God’s chief and principal benefits given and declared to mankind here on earth. Let us thank God heartily for this his great and special gift, beneficial favour and fatherly providence. Let us be glad to revive this precious gift of our heavenly Father. Let us hear, read and know these holy rules, injunctions and statutes of our Christian religion, and upon that we have made profession to God at our baptism. Let us with fear and reverence lay up in the chest of our hearts these necessary and fruitful lessons. Let us night and day muse and have meditation and contemplation in them; let us ruminate and, as it were, chew the cud, that we may have the sweet juice, spiritual effect, marrow, honey, kernel, kernel, taste, comfort and consolation of them. Let us stay, quiet and certify our consciences with the most infallible certainty, truth and perpetual assurance of them. Let us pray to God, the only author of these heavenly meditations, that we may speak, think, believe, live and depart hence, according to the wholesome doctrine and verities of them. And by that means, in this world we shall have God’s protection, favour and grace, with the unspeakable solace of peace and quietness of conscience, and after this miserable life, we shall enjoy the endless bliss and glory of heaven, which he grant us all that died for us all, Jesus Christ, to whom with the Father and Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, both now and everlastingly. Amen.
Just as he did with John Calvin, may God bring our minds to a teachable frame, make us able receive the good news of our creation, preservation, and salvation in Christ Jesus revealed to us in Scripture.
One feels a bit like a reactionary for pointing this out, but it really did happen! Similarly, the required Paul course that I took was entirely about various ways in which Paul seems difficult or ‘problematic’ to modern readers: questions of Paul and gender, sexuality, slavery, Judaism, and so forth. Now, these are important questions that require careful thought, and particularly in the context of mainline churches long dominated by ‘Paul is bad’ homiletics, preachers should be able to think about and discuss them. But at the same time, this way of framing the class is the opposite of coming to Paul’s writings to learn and be guided from them! It seems to me that the first thing to do (really with any text, but especially with the inspired one!) is to try to learn what it has to say on its own terms, and only secondarily put to it the sort of questions with which we moderns are concerned. For Paul, certainly, did not think the core of his message was about gender or sexuality or slavery but about the good news of what God has done for us all in Christ Jesus!
The Anglican Church of Canada has done this, as this Living Church article describes. You can see the remarkably poor theological tenor of the discussion around embracing it in this video, around 1:30:00.
I appreciate, for what it’s worth, that there are genuine pastoral challenges for some people around, say, the use of father language or male pronouns for God. I agree with the feminist critique that there is a danger that the use of masculine language for God can deify maleness. I’ve written about this a bit here. But I often find a profound gulf in these conversations between those who think that we need to ultimately conform ourselves to the language that God has given us to speak about him and those who seem, as far as I can tell, to reject the idea that revelation must have the final ‘say’ for our language about God, especially our public liturgical language.
Well said.