Hermeneutics

Does Our Reading of the Bible Hinder Mission?

It’s entirely possible to read the Bible and somehow miss the good news of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God. This is unintentional but still a problem. People sometimes cherry-pick passages from the Bible to justify their own ideologies and sometimes the Bible is simply read through frameworks of other stories than the biblical narrative. Although such readings may note the good news of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God, like the disciples in the Gospel of Mark, some readers of the Bible still have a fuzzy vision. Restoring a 20/20 vision of the gospel is necessary.¹

Another way Christians sometimes misread the Bible is by reading through a particular hermeneutical lens, one that is usually inherited through participation in a particular church. This is the issue I address in the second chapter of my book Gospel Portraits: Reading Scripture as Participants in the Mission of God.

One such hermeneutic is what Scot McKnight characterizes as the soterian gospel, which equates the gospel with salvation.² This particular lens is prevalent among many Evangelical churches and is expressed with questions like “Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?” or even “If you died tonight, do you know where you would spend eternity?” Such questions are not inherently wrong but when this becomes the hermeneutical lens that Christians read the Bible with, the focus shifts to getting people saved. The problem is that discipleship, learning to live as followers of Jesus, often becomes secondary and as a result, participation in the mission of God suffers.

In my own church tribe, the Churches of Christ, the dominant hermeneutic is often referred to as CENI. This is short-hand for Commands, Examples, and Necessary Inferences. There’s a lot of history and assumptions with this hermeneutical lens that I discuss in the book. For now, I want to point out that this hermeneutic was tied to the historical goal of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement of restoring primitive Christianity. The focus was on restoring the pattern of the New Testament church, an ecclesiological focus. All that was needed was knowing the will of God for the church which was given through commands, examples, and necessary inferences.³

One of the ongoing challenges with the CENI hermeneutic is legalism, in that the reading of scripture came to focus on a strict reproduction of a church pattern deducted from the New Testament.⁴ Deviation from the so-called pattern of the church was considered as disobeying God’s word and so the congregations known as Churches of Christ became rather homogenous, regardless of their local context. Congregations became clones of a mother church, if you will, that took shape within the rural Bible-belt states. As new churches were planted outside of the Bible belt in more urban and suburban areas, these churches, which assumed their Bible-belt form, relating in a faithful but relevant manner to their community was difficult. Now in the twenty-first century, the lack of contextualization with a rapidly changing cultural landscape has made a contextualized participation in the mission of God even more difficult. It is one reason, not the only reason, but one reason and, in my opinion, a significant reason why the Churches of Christ are declining.

What I am proposing is the need for a missional hermeneutic, which is a reading of the Bible that opens space for a faithful but contextualized participation in the mission of God. Such a reading does not jettison the Bible at all but instead is a recognition of the missional nature of God at work in history as depicted within scripture.

The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation confesses that God, the Eternal Word became the Incarnate Word. God became flesh and made his dwelling among us in the person of Jesus Christ (cf. John 1:1-5, 14-18). This is why Christians believe that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human. But, to also speak with Trinitarian language, what God the Father is doing in the Son by the power of the Spirit is coming to us and becoming one of us rather than making us come to him and become him. This is the foundation for a missional hermeneutic, a reading of the Bible that opens space for contextualized participation in the mission of God.

In subsequent posts, I will unpack more of what contextualized participation in the mission of God implies and requires. For now, I’ll simply say that contextualization holds together the need of living as faithful and relevant witnesses of the good news of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God.

The church, both universally and locally, is called to follow Jesus as a participant in the mission of God. For such participation, reading the Bible is essential but we also need a missional hermeneutic as we open the word of God in scripture. To that end, my prayer is that Gospel Portraits will help cultivate this missional hermeneutic that opens space for a new imagination of what it means to live as the church.

1. For more discussion, read my previous post Reading The Bible: Just Don’t Overlook Jesus, June 22, 2022.

2. Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011, 29. Note that the word “soterian” comes from the Greek sōtēria (salvation).

3. Thomas H. Olbricht, “Hermeneutics in the Churches of Christ,” Restoration Quarterly 37, January 1995, 14-15.

4. Two other helpful books to read regarding Churches of Christ and the issue of hermeneutics are John Mark Hick, Searching For The Pattern: My Journey in Interpreting the Bible, 2019; Thomas H. Olbricht, Hearing God’s Voice: My Life with Scripture in the Churches of Christ, Abilene: ACU Press, 1996.