Fourth in a series of teachings exploring the Confession of Faith from a Mennonite Perspective.
Will Fitzgerald, given at Kalamazoo Mennonite Fellowship, 2006-02-18
What do Mennonites think about the Bible?
Let’s start by talking about “the Word of God.” This, as an expression, is probably very familiar to us. I want you to fill in the blank: when most people say “the Word of God,” they usually mean _. I’d be surprised if you said anything but “the Bible,” that is, the 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament.
But how does the Bible use the expression “the Word of God”? If the Bible is the “Word of God,” we had better understand what it means by this expression, otherwise, we’re likely to get it wrong.
The following is based on the commentary from the Confession.
According to Scripture, the term “the Word of the Lord” or “the Word of God” or “the Word” refers to:
So, we can say that the scriptures are one way that God presents with “the Word”—that is, presents us with Jesus, the Word made flesh, and the message of God.
I don’t think it’s a particularly radical thing to say, at least in Christian circles, that the scriptures point to, and center around, Jesus and his message.
Christians see the history of God’s plan for saving the world as being predicted in the Old Testament, with strong hints and clear testimonies about a coming Messiah, Christ, the anointed one of God. We believe that Jesus was that anointed one, and the scripture gives us four accounts, taking up just about 50% of the New Testament, describing his life. The rest of the New Testament describes life in his early church, instructions for living as his disciples, and the hope of his very exciting return.
This means, I believe, as followers of Jesus, that we understand and interpret the scriptures through the lens of his life and teaching. When we read Jesus saying, “‘Love the Lord your God with your whole body, mind and strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” sums up the requirements of the Old Testament law, we believe him. When we read the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain—extended accounts of what he came for, and the kind of community he came to call forth, we believe him, and try to obey him.
Thus, we come to hard scriptures, ones that are difficult to understand, we look to the life and teachings of Jesus to make sense of them. Deuteronomy 22 says we shouldn’t wear clothes of wool and linen woven together, and we should have tassels on the four corners of our coats. Hmm. That’s hard to understand. What does Jesus’s teach? Well, he said that what comes out of a man is more important than what goes in; and I think that’s probably true for what we wear; as far as the clothes themselves go, I believe he has declared “all things clean.” (I think he is in favor of modest clothes, though.) Sometimes we come across scriptures which seem to contradict one another, either because we’re too stupid to understand the difference, or perhaps there really is a tension, especially when applied to a particular situation, either past or present. Jesus’s life and teaching provide keys to understanding how to ease the tension, especially remembering the rules of “Love God, Love your neighbor” which are central to Jesus’s teaching.
This Jesus-centered approach to the Scripture may not seem radical, but it is. One of the things the church has been good at is pushing off the teachings of Jesus off to the side, and emphasizing other things instead. Often, these are very good things—theological understandings of the Godhead, how salvation works, the Bible itself—but we have to come back to Jesus. We may call ourselves Anabaptists or Mennonites, but we’re really Christians, “Jesusites,” as it were.
Another way this Jesus-centered approach is radical is that sometimes the teachings of Jesus themselves are hard, but in a different way—they’re hard to live out. “Take up your cross and daily follow me” is (in some ways) very easy to understand, but (in all ways) very difficult to live out.
Another important aspect of the Mennonite approach to scripture is that there is an emphasis on the community interpreting scripture, rather than relying solely on one’s individual interpretation or the interpretation of given to us by authorities, whether religious or scholarly. Note that I “rather than relying solely”—we ought to be reading and understanding scriptures as individuals, placing ourselves under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and we ought to be listening to worthy people who have invested time in study and reflection on scripture, how scripture is interpreted, the history of interpretations, etc. After all, people have been reading and writing about the Bible for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it would be foolish to ignore it all.
When the first group of people who would later be called Anabaptists were gathering in Switzerland, they essentially did what we would later call a “Bible study.” They were students of Ulrich Zwingli, an important leader in the Protestant Reformation Zürich. Zwingli founded the study group. Apparently, they met five days a week at 7 in the morning, read the scripture in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and discuss the passage in German. (By the way, starting tomorrow morning, I expect you all to be here at 7 am to do the same.)
Eventually Zwingli and some of his students—the ones we call Anabaptists—came to differ on important issues like baptism. But there was an important difference in controlling interpretation of scripture, too. Zwingli held his position by virtue of the town council in Zürich, and he felt that the state should have a say in correctly interpreting scripture. But these students, looking at their Bibles together, came to different views together. Zwingli, their teacher, said the Council should decide how to observe the mass, but one of the students replied:
Master Ulrich, you have no authority to place the decision in [the Council’s] hands, for the decision is already made: the Spirit of God decides. If therefore [the Council] were to discern and decide anything that is contrary to God’s decision, I will ask Christ for his Spirit and will teach and act against it.”
Their understanding of the word of God—the word of God as we described it before, in its fulness—trumped the state’s. This is common enough, perhaps, for people like us, but it was enough to get many of the early Anabaptists arrested or killed, both by Protestants (including Zwingli and the Council) and Catholics alike. Giving up power is never easy.
When Bess and I were members of Reba Place Church, there was a strong emphasis on small groups, an emphasis we were very much in agreement with, and we decided to host a small group in our house. The existing small groups all had names, and they were very pretty names, like “The Clearing.” So we tried and tried to think up a name for our group, and we kept coming up with soap opera names, like “The Guiding Light,” “One Life to Live,” “General Hospital,”…. We finally gave up, and decided to just call ourselves “The Bulldogs.” (We had a youth annex, too, that little Jane was in: “The Bullpups.”) We met primarily for Bible study and worship, and we wanted especially to include people who weren’t already members of Reba Place. It always astonished me, week by week, how the Spirit would work through that group of people: Bess and I, a new believer from China who didn’t really speak English that well, a woman with developmental problems, a somewhat jaded friend, and other various people who came in and out. The Word of God would present himself to us through those pages, these people gathered together to read and discuss scripture. It shouldn’t have surprised me, of course. Jesus promised to be where “two or more are gathered” in his name, we had the written word in front of us, we’d prayed and worshiped, and we were trying to attend to learn and listen together: good preparation, I think, for a mindfulness of the Word of God.
You can read more details about the Mennonite Church USA’s view on Scripture by reading the Confession of Faith from a Mennonite Perspective, specifically, Article 4. I think I would be remiss if I didn’t say that there are lots of different kinds of Mennonites, and their stated and actual view of scripture vary quite a bit. We’ve talked about three emphases, centered around the Living Word of God. Scripture is one very, very important way that the Word of God comes to us, perhaps especially as we gather to read scripture and understand its message for us together. Scripture’s message to us is primarily about Jesus, and to be interpreted though his life and teachings, described to us through scripture. I do hope that, as the Kalamazoo Mennonite Fellowship continues, we’ll have more opportunities to read and understand scripture together.