Review: Reading Scripture the Emmaus way

This is the last of a trilogy of related works by Canadian theologian Bradley Jersak, following on from A More Christlike God and A More Christlike Way. It is

A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the Emmaus Way by Bradley Jersak (Whitaker House, 2021).

It has a foreword by Peter Enns on five aspects of biblical interpretation.

Jersak’s emphasis in all three of his books is the supremacy of Christ, to whom all other aspects of faith and doctrine must bow, since he alone is ‘the exact representation of God’s being’. The ‘Emmaus’ reference in the title is, of course, to Jesus’ dialogue with two disheartened disciples in Luke 24, where ‘he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.’

The author is wary of calling the Bible ‘the word of God’, in the conviction that only Jesus himself can claim that title. The Bible is a witness to him, no more. In the light of that, some of the notions of biblical inspiration, infallibility and inerrancy common in evangelical circles are open to question. He addresses them all in depth, along with the concept of the ‘canon’ of Scripture. In doing so, the author is open about his personal journey from dispensationalism, via Calvinism, to a more Christ-centred position, and how that has altered his approach to such issues.

He looks frankly at the brutal, genocidal passages in the Old Testament, concluding that God never commanded them, even though his people at the time thought he did. From there, it’s a short step to a critique of PSA (penal substitutionary atonement), where God allegedly killed Jesus, using violence to achieve his ends, and to a different (and now widely accepted) understanding of God’s ‘wrath’. In all this, he leans heavily on patristics (the church leaders of the first few centuries, and their hermeneutics), lamenting the fact that modern evangelicalism tends to ignore almost everything between Paul and Martin Luther.

In addressing his theme, Jersak anticipates the objections that some readers will interject, and he deals with them thoroughly, and with grace. These include charges of supercessionism, eisegesis and the ‘spiritualising’ or ‘over-allegorising’ of Scripture.

In addition to rejecting the ‘flat reading’ of the Bible associated with modern concepts of inerrancy, he questions the ‘progressive revelation’ approach. Instead, he prefers ‘progressive illumination’—spelling out the differences and making a good case for it. He also looks with favour on the Septuagint (LXX, the Greek translation of the Old Testament), which was the version of the OT used by the NT writers. He illustrates how it often undercuts evangelical ideas like God punishing Jesus at Calvary (see the LXX of Isaiah 53:10).

He looks in detail at some literary features of the Bible often overlooked, such as allegory, ‘myth’, rhetoric, diatribe, phenomenology and anthropomorphism, with examples of each. He maintains that without some grasp of how the NT writers, in particular, used these stylistic devices, we cannot hope to get a clear understanding of what they are saying.

Evangelicals have tended to look down on church calendar-based practices revolving round liturgy and the lectionary. Jersak makes a strong case for a return to such approaches as guarantees that we get a rounded picture of God’s redemptive purpose instead of just pecking around the Bible for an interesting sermon-topic or a ‘blessed thought’.

To the huge current discussion about the nature of the Bible this book brings a helpful contribution. It’s not an easy bedtime read, but the effort of working your way through it will be a worthwhile challenge.

Here’s a selection of quotations, with page numbers.

When we stand firm on Scripture’s central revelation—that Jesus Christ, the Word-made-flesh, is what God finally says about himself—biblicism (the notion that the Bible is our final authority) presents a thousand objections in the form of contrary biblical proof texts.  (p20)

Reading the whole Bible as a testimony of Jesus and as the grand narrative of redemption will require us to revisit our patterns of interpretation and layers of reading—attending to the literal, moral, and spiritual sense described by the early church.  (p24)

The Word of God is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. And when he was about eighteen years old, he grew a beard.  (p26)

The Word is a person. The confusion or conflation of inspired texts with the eternal Son of God is deeply problematic, especially when the Bible displaces Christ as the “Word of God” and “Scripture alone” becomes our “sole and final authority” instead of him.  (p27)

When I reoriented from Bible to Christ as the locus of the Word of God, Scripture became my map—or an inspired compass—rather than my destination, its authors, narrators, and events all employed by God’s Spirit, directing me to pursue the Person.  (p36)

…the difference between reading the Bible as a flat text (where every word has equal authority), progressive revelation (where all the words accumulate in a crescendo of consistent truth), and the Christocentric view (where Christ is the pinnacle of revelation, and every word must finally submit to him).  (p38)

[Re Numbers chapter 31]  Could the Abba Jesus revealed say, “Wipe out the foreigners. Take their women and sort them into virgins and nonvirgins”? (Who checked? How?) “Slaughter the nonvirgins and keep the virgins for yourself. But tithe a tenth of them to the Levites for their use”? (What use?)  (p39)

Following N. T. Wright and others, I no longer capitalize satan. Brian Zahnd says “the satan” is less than a person, more than a metaphor. It is the real phenomenon of evil, rooted in human sin, and verges on self-awareness. Most importantly, the satan phenomenon is undone by Love.  (p42)

“You mean in Eastern Orthodox churches you don’t have to believe in penal substitution?” I asked, hopeful.  “No, I mean in the Orthodox church you are required not to believe in it,” he replied firmly, adding, “And there are 350 million of us who have never believed it.”  (p49)

Once PSA fell, every doctrine related to divine retribution began to topple in turn. If God truly is Love in his essential nature, the necessity of eternal conscious torment, acts of divine genocide, and literalist interpretations of wrath fall too.  (p50)

I read 1 Samuel 15 to Vladika and asked him how the Abba whom Jesus Christ revealed as perfect love and unfailing mercy could possibly issue such a command. Without hesitation, he replied, “He didn’t.” I countered, “But the Bible says he did.” He parried with these surprising words: “No, these are the words of Samuel, a cantankerous old bigot who would not let go of his prejudice, projecting his own malice, unforgiveness, and need for vengeance into the mouth of Yahweh.”  (p51)

What the Bible calls “God’s wrath” is a metaphor for the self-induced consequences or intrinsic judgment of our own turning from Perfect Love.  (p52)

I am especially taken with Pete Enns’s “Christotelic” interpretation, which is why I asked him to explain it in the foreword to this book. In fact, he’s answered one of my most bewildering questions in one sentence: Why does the Bible contain so many bizarre, offensive, and un-Christlike depictions of God? Pete’s answer: “Because God let his children tell the story.”  (p53)

How you see the Bible changes your relationship with it. As I keep insisting, Christ gets the final word, and the Scriptures testify to his authority. I relate to Christ as God’s Word and to the Bible as one (and not the only) venue where I can hear the living Voice.  (p57)

I personally receive the Scriptures as authoritative insofar as they testify to Jesus. But I don’t see them making authoritative claims on matters of history, science, or even religion (e.g., I don’t submit myself to the purity laws of Leviticus). Rather, I ask, “How are the Law and Prophets not abolished but fulfilled in Jesus?” I let the authors say what they say on their own terms and then ask what the message is saying to me about Christ, his gospel, and his call for me to grow in love, by grace, toward God and my neighbors.  (p72)

The canon of faith was established by Christ and his apostles from the beginning, but the canon of Scripture has always been hotly contested. In fact, the canon of Scripture differs from Protestant to Catholic to Eastern Orthodox to Coptic Orthodox to Ethiopian Orthodox and beyond…to this day!…  The ecumenical councils felt it essential to be led by the infallible Holy Spirit to remember the gospel and articulate it infallibly in the first creeds—even before they finalized what books were canonical.  (p74)

[Re 2 Cor 3:5-18]  The veils are not only being removed from our own hearts as we read Scripture. Over the millennia, veil upon veil has been progressively removed within the Bible itself. That is, the authors who produced the Scriptures by the Spirit were themselves subject to temporal veils. Their veils glorified tribalism and nativism, militarism and violence, racism and misogyny, imperial and colonial ambition, and so on. Just like us!  (p79)

Prior even to opening the scrolls, the famous rabbi Philo understood that God is all-good and all-merciful. That understanding became his first interpretive principle. It predetermined how Scripture was to be understood and applied. Where God is portrayed as good, Philo instructs us to read that as a revelation of the good God. Where God is not portrayed as good, he instructs us to read allegorically, because we must never allow a literalist interpretation to negate our understanding of God’s goodness.  (p89)

I would suggest that the liturgical reading of the Scriptures in the context of community worship and the lectionary cycles, with its connections of linked texts, provided an essential medium for understanding the message that preceded the Bible—an understanding that is not as obvious in the printed version. In other words, the “divine liturgy” of the church is a medium that functions to frame the Scriptures within the canon of faith—the message of the gospel—showing how they work together within the drama of redemption that inexorably points to Christ crucified and risen. So, too, the lectionary cycles: these frame the Scriptures within the church calendar precisely in order to lead us to Christ and his gospel.  (p94)

I have often seen people, through a flat reading of the Bible, use particular Scriptures to argue against the very teachings of Jesus Christ, justifying from the idolized text that which the Word himself forbade. When the Bible becomes our final authority, Jesus is demoted to a mere episode in the Good Book.  (p95)

The next time you make eye contact with another human being, look through their eyes to the depths of their heart, to the treasure that is their true self, and then look to the deep joy of Christ’s adoring gaze. Leave behind the worm theology that judges another person’s deepest heart as deceitful and desperately wicked. Value them as you would a priceless gem—because Jesus did.  (p103)

When you compare translations side by side, the question is NOT necessarily which one best represents the first manuscripts, but which one best represents the gospel.  (p108)

[Quoting David Bentley Hart]  Fundamentalist literalism is a modern heresy, one that breaks from Christian practice with such violence as to call into question whether those who practice it are still truly obedient to the apostolic faith at all.  (p112)

Biblical literalism and inerrancy predetermine limits on what the Bible cannot do or say before even reading the text or allowing it to speak for itself. The result is an unwitting assault on the authority of Scripture, which itself is subordinate to Christ the Word. Inerrancy, then, is a modernist ideal that stands over Scripture (and over Christ!), attempting to master the text—to dissect it with the scalpel of literalism.  (p113)

We’ve learned that the Epistles are more than propositional teachings and ethical letters. Ben Witherington III and David deSilva have helped us to see these New Testament Epistles as sermons, written to be preached and crafted by masters of first-century rhetoric.  (p122)

The early masters of Scripture such as Origen in the East and Jerome in the West were simply following Jesus’s own hermeneutic and training us to emulate our Master-Teacher. And while literalists are skittish of allegory, Jesus makes it necessary for an Emmaus-Way interpretation. Contrary to my training, early church fathers didn’t come up with allegorical interpretation—Jesus and his apostolic successors were already adept at using and modeling it to unveil the gospel.  (p134)

Many disillusioned Christians, embittered ex-Evangelicals, and haughty New Atheists denigrate the Bible in the easiest possible way: they continue to read it as fundamentalist literalists—then use their misinterpretation of the sacred Scriptures against it as ammunition.  (p135)

Yes, I believe Jesus actually performed a wedding miracle in Cana, met with Nicodemus under the stars, and sat with a Samaritan woman who had been divorced five times. And I also believe the water-to-wine miracle is a parable of our transformation, that Nicodemus’s born-again transformation and the Samaritan woman’s inner spring are stories about us. I am/we are the morphing water. I am/we are Nicodemus. I am/we are the Samaritan. I am/we are the woman caught in adultery, and the blind man, rescued and healed by Christ. This dual reality of history and allegory is what Lewis meant by “true myth.”  (p151)

We can be liberal in saying, “I see Christ foreshadowed here,” without claiming, “God told me this verse means that.” This is not an “anything goes” hermeneutic. Rather, we’re reading with an open ear for intimations of the gospel itself within the Scriptures.  (p159)

A great many details of our sacred text still surprise and bewilder me. I can’t get my head around great chunks of it. But I trust that God is good, that Jesus is Lord, and that the unsearchable ways I read about are riches to be cherished. For me, being stumped has become an invitation to worship and to perpetual discovery.  (p168)

Hosea is one of our clearest revelations of the radical freedom of God to forgive sin without punishment, payment, sacrifice, or even repentance.  (p174)

[Re Deuteronomy 20-21]  I know Christians who are so hateful to Muslims that if I showed them this passage and said it was from the Qur’an, they would not hesitate to condemn and burn it. But if it’s in the Bible? Does the binding and title on the book suddenly make it defensible?  (p183)

The average Christian is now less biblically literate, and the average atheist is significantly more biblically aware, now than in the twentieth century.  (p190)

Worship precedes theology, often by several decades. As we experience the presence of God in prayer and worship, we begin to compose liturgies and songs that express what we have come to see. Eventually, theologians become observant and follow suit. Teachers may begin to confirm the implications of what the congregation has already been singing and praying (which is to say, believing) over the past decades. Ironically, the first generation of these teachers are often regarded as heretical, sometimes even by the very congregants who spawned the original revelation.  (p191)

The Bible is a revelation about us and about God. What the Bible reveals about the fallen human condition is our “sin.” This includes the depth of our “death anxiety,” the nature of “mimetic desire” and the “scapegoating mechanism,” and our human propensity to demand retributive justice and then sacralize retribution through sacrificial religion.  (p196)

[Re the book of Job]  Would the story have been better if we had simply skipped the first thirty-one chapters? After all, God himself tells us that virtually everything to that point was folly! Then why not just delete it? Why fill our minds with flaws? I used to flip right to the “good stuff” in Job until I started seeing how “good” the foolish counsel seemed to me. Some of it appears to make good sense. Exactly! The important function of the friends’ speeches is to shine a light on our own idiocy. The friends’ speeches are an inspired revelation of our own error, not a divine thumbs-up to their error.  (p203)

When we read the psalmist’s blessing on infanticide in Psalm 137:9, no sane person who has experienced the Father’s love honestly believes this is a revelation of God’s will. We know instinctively that we have here a revelation of the psalmist’s real but misguided demand for justice.  (p204)

We ought to bear in mind that just like Abraham, Moses, and David, so too the apostles of Christ and the authors of the New Testament were people in the process of transformation and discovery, not omniscient angels with magical pens. Their works, too, reveal both the human condition and faith culture of their era…and the divine solution—Jesus Christ, to whom all Scripture (before and after) points.  (p208)

We have often imagined that when we disobey a divine warning, God, rather than our own disobedience, becomes the threat and the source of harm. We confuse the wages of sin (intrinsic consequences) with the wrath (violent anger) of God.  (p221)

God deals with sin through correction, not punishment. That’s Clement, that’s Hebrews, that’s Hosea. The chastisements of God are disciplinary—not because divine justice demands satisfaction, payback, or wrath, but because a patient God is raising beloved children who tend to learn the hard way.  (p226)

I would argue that the number one genre error in biblical interpretation occurs when we mistake epistles for straightforward didactic teaching when, in fact, they are rhetorical sermons, designed to be preached aloud in the congregation.  (p233)

[Re Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats]  We literalize the parable into an eschatology. And since we can’t work out why the criterion of judgment is mercy rather than faith in Christ, we sit around reworking our end-times timeline instead of welcoming the stranger or visiting those who are sick and in prison.  (p244)

The Bible says God DOES change his mind. Some examples are Exodus 32:12–14; 2 Samuel 24:16; Jeremiah 18:8–10; 26:13, 19; 42:10; Ezekiel 7:22; Jonah 3:9–10; 4:2; and Amos 7:3–6. The Bible also says God DOESN’T change his mind. Examples: Numbers 23:19; 1 Samuel 15:29; Isaiah 31:2; 2 Corinthians 1:19; and James 1:17. Does the Bible contradict itself? Yes, these verses are contradictory if we read them literally. If we forget to account for worldviews and phenomenology…  (p251)

What, then, shall we say to those texts that announce God’s wrath? I argue that to avoid regressing to pagan images of God, we must read them as anthropomorphisms—i.e., figures of speech projecting human characteristics onto God.  (p254)

It’s not as though God is some heartless Stoic in the sky or the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle’s philosophy. No, God is LOVE. And God is relational and responsive to us—infinitely so. It’s just that God’s love is not reactive, subject to or contingent upon our drama, shame, or performance. Rather, God’s love flows as the infinite, constant, and unfailing spring of his own nature. Does God grieve with us and rejoice with us? The incarnation reveals God’s limitless empathy. Yes, God sympathizes with our weaknesses and knows the human condition from within—but not as one whose character (love/goodness) is jerked around by external forces.  (p266)

These patristic giants defined orthodoxy and defended it against some of the same heresies that pass themselves off as mainstream Christianity today. Their dogmatic teaching on the Christlike God of unswerving goodness and cruciform love is the gospel through which all Scripture must be read. I commend them to you as the pinnacle of biblical interpretation, without whom we would have no Bible at all.  (p268)

I see the deconstructionists exiting their churches and walking away from faith by the tens of millions. One reason for this is that they’ve been indoctrinated with false images of who God is and what God requires. The wrathful God who threatened to burn them in hell forever if they don’t believe right or behave right is not the Abba whom Jesus revealed—not the gracious and gentle Shepherd who descends into hades to rescue lost sheep, who are too entangled in briars to find their way home.   (p271)

The parable of the prodigal son(s) is the clearest picture we have of what wrath is, how it works, what causes it, and how it is and isn’t “God’s.” The Prodigal Son woke up in a pigpen of his own making and came to his senses. The father did not send him there. Were his days or years or life of misery literally God’s wrath (anger expressed as violence)? No. But his trials were transformed by God’s grace into the big story of the son’s redemption.  (p274)

My reviews of other books by Brad Jersak:

• A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel – here
• Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope and the New Jerusalem – here