Anthony Chvala-Smith

Anthony Chvala-Smith is theologian in residence for the church at its International Headquarters in Independence, Missouri, and serves on the faculty of the Community of Christ Seminary at Graceland University.

Discernment Activity
Doctrine and Covenants 163
Commentary Series

An Indispensable Witness
By Anthony Chvala-Smith

Scripture is an indispensable witness to the Eternal Source of light and truth, which cannot be fully contained in any finite vessel or language. Scripture has been written and shaped by human authors through experiences of revelation and ongoing inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the midst of time and culture.

Scripture is not to be worshiped or idolized. Only God, the Eternal One of whom scripture testifies, is worthy of worship. God’s nature, as revealed in Jesus Christ and affirmed by the Holy Spirit, provides the ultimate standard by which any portion of scripture should be interpreted and applied.—Doctrine and Covenants 163:7a–b

Timing is everything. The bold words of Section 163:7a–b have come to the church in what the biblical tradition calls a kairos: a Greek term meaning “critical moment.” Here the Holy Spirit lovingly speaks a timely word to us. It comes not a moment too soon, for in no other arena of our life together as Community of Christ do we find ourselves so conflicted. There is much uncertainty throughout the church today as to what we will claim about our sacred texts and how we will use them.

My comments on 163:7a–b center on one word: “indispensable.” It’s a hard word for us. But ignoring it may cause us to miss our exit for the less traveled road, the road to becoming the radically “other” people we are called to be. Spiritual guide and author Corrine Ware notes in her book Saint Benedict on the Freeway (Abingdon, 85–86) that “…if we enter the twenty-first century without an anchor, a text, a rule of life, and a way to spiritually sustain ourselves, we will find ourselves adrift and lost. A Rule of Life for the twenty-first century must include in it somewhere, somehow, the reading and study of our common record of faith.” In other words, a community neither formed nor normed by scripture may stay afloat but it will have difficulty sailing anywhere.

“Somewhere, somehow,” we must reinvest our life together with a fresh, imaginative, and attentive hearing, telling, and living of the Sacred Story. In D. and C. 163:7 we can hear God calling us to the promising task of letting scripture be essential in a way it has never been before.

The Proverbial “Rock and a Hard Place”

No voyage could be more difficult for us right now. For many reasons, treating scripture as indispensable has become a thorny business. A few examples will illustrate the point.

Not long ago I heard an entire Communion sermon that made not a single clear reference to scripture. After more than a decade of lectionary use, this struck me as odd, until I noted what the preacher’s real authorities were. Actually, there was only one: personal experience. “I think,” “I feel,” “as I see it” punctuated the sermon. There was no Gospel reading, no epistle, no psalm or prophet. Experience and opinion had trumped them all. Reasons/excuses for non-use of scripture abound. But in that service, an opportunity to re-anchor our lives in the saving story of the Lord’s Supper, the self-giving love of God, and the unfailing presence of the Spirit was lost. The sacrament was only about us.

Alongside neglect of scripture is misuse of it. A colleague in ministry recently recounted a disturbing incident that illustrates this side of the problem. She and her husband were supporting a friend by attending church with her. The friend had recently come to trust God’s love for her and in so doing found the courage to divorce the man, who for thirty years justified his abuse of her by regularly quoting the Bible. She and my colleague and her husband sat in disbelief as the minister, quoting 1 Peter 3, publically instructed women that in abusive marriages they might just be called to suffer like Jesus for the sake of the abusing spouse.

No care was given to understanding this passage in light of the ancient Roman social world. No attention was paid to the danger of “for the Bible tells me so,” since the Bible can tell me nothing without my interpretative action. Instead, a man with ecclesial power used the Bible as a blunt instrument to control and dominate, unconcerned that he was rewarding oppressors and further harming victims. This happened in another denomination, but ours is no stranger to such misuses. Little wonder that some see such cruelty in the name of scripture as reason enough to leave scripture behind.

“So we sailed up the narrow strait lamenting. On one side was Scylla, and on the other side was shining Charybdis….” In this line from the classic epic of ancient Greek mythology, Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus mourns as his ship and crew must navigate the dangerous passage between two mythical sea monsters. On one side is Scylla, a six-headed beast who feeds on sailors; on the other, Charybdis, a whirlpool-creating behemoth who sucks down whole ships. To pass between Scylla and Charybdis is to be caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Ours is not unlike Odysseus’s plight. We find ourselves pinched between two deadly, but popular, ways of relating to scripture. On one side scripture is viewed as a divine oracle, a “Deus ex machina,” a set of magic books dropped from the sky containing simple formulas for all of life’s problems: from the origin of the species to proper discipline for children to sexual ethics. Instead of the bothersome work of sound interpretation, scripture is treated like a drive-up window for fast-food theology.

A church member arguing for the inerrancy of the Bible once told us the Bible is “God with us.” She was untroubled with the idea that a book was equal to God or with the fact that the book describes, not itself, but Jesus as “God with us”! In this approach, “The Bible says…” becomes a simplistic battle cry, and scripture the battle-ax. The worship of a finite object and our human certainties about it replaces the worship of the immortal and invisible God, “whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:16 NRSV). And according to the prophetic rebuke of D. and C. 163:7a–b, this entire approach fails the idolatry test: “Scripture is not to be worshiped or idolized. Only God, the Eternal One of whom scripture testifies, is worthy of worship.”

On the other side, scripture is considered an irrelevant collection of outdated mythological ideas, or a monumental inconvenience—except when it coincides with one’s favorite causes. This approach assumes that scripture is not revelatory, authoritative, or a necessary witness to God’s being and work, but rather an impediment. In knee-jerk reaction to Scylla, Charybdis works hard to debunk scripture and void its influence, and sometimes shames members who yearn to live in its light.

Sadly, this approach often uses the otherwise worthy tools of critical scholarship, which in many circumstances can enrich our understanding of scripture, to devalue it. Scholarly information and hypotheses are viewed as the only real meaning of the text, thus silencing the text as witness to the Living God. As Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) once observed, learning mixed with pride is “venomous and understands nothing in scripture but the letter” (The Dialogue, Paulist Press, 249). To this approach, D. and C. 163:7a-b offers an equally sharp censure: scripture is human witness to divine things, written in response to God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

Section 163 asks us hard questions: Will we use scripture to promote a liberating knowledge of God, or to terrorize and manipulate? Conversely, will we humbly seek to be addressed by the Living One here, or will we stifle the Spirit’s voice, certain we already know better? In these paragraphs we are offered a third way: between Scylla and Charybdis, if we will listen and change our habitual ways of relating to scripture. This third way is not a “middle” way, a happy medium, a tasteless, harmless in-between, but a genuine alternative, a thoroughly transforming, breathtaking route into God’s heart.

Indispensable Witness

“Indispensable” is a robust word with many implications. It means that there are no substitutes. Scripture can’t be replaced by Chicken Soup for the Soul, the Urantia Book, or the Gospel of Thomas. Scripture is to be savored, prayerfully engaged, and interpreted with greatest care. “Indispensable” means that these will be the writings that (to borrow a witty image from theologian Karl Barth) the church must agree to let scripture look over its shoulder and correct its notebooks (see Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, 32; note: “evangelical” in Europe means “Protestant,” and not what it means in contemporary American theology). I understand Barth saying the church will let scripture be its guide and norm and correct it (the church) when it strays. In other words, we can’t get from anywhere else the kind of guidance we get here, in matters theological.

Why is scripture indispensable? From one angle of vision, the answer is practical. Scripture, especially the Bible, passes on the memory of Israel’s and the early church’s saving encounters with God. Christianity isn’t a “make it up as you go” religion, but is grounded in historical experience. Theological amnesia can be prevented, but only by reminding ourselves of the Sacred Story and the One at its center. Further, scripture gives us a common language of faith and a collection of shared concepts and stories that enable the church to truly be a multicultural, transgenerational unity. The many voices in scripture allow all to hear, in one way or another, the mighty acts of God.

Gregory the Great (540–604) said: “Scripture is like a river, broad and deep, shallow enough here for lambs to go wading, but deep enough there for the elephant to swim” (see “Morals in the Book of Job,” 1.1.4, as quoted in The Spiritual Formation Bible, Zondervan). Scripture, too, critiques our tendency to idolize our religious experience, our cultures, our national life, or any of the many other divine imposters seeking our allegiance. We need what Walter Brueggemann calls the “counterworld” of scripture to help us be conformed not to this world, but to the kingdom Jesus preached.

From another vantage point, scripture is essential because of what it can be for us. Augustine (354–430), theologian and preacher of the early church, in several of his sermons found an illuminating image for scripture in the story of the hemorrhaging woman healed by touching Jesus’ garment. To hear scripture, which he calls “the choir of the apostles,” is like touching Christ’s robe.

Augustine’s point is that scripture functions for the church like the garment in the Gospel story. It isn’t Christ, but it does mediate him; the hem doesn’t heal, but through it Christ does, when we lay hold of it. It is good to question whether we can rightly say we believe in scripture (since it’s not God); but unless we believe through scripture, the object of our faith may be only a pale reflection of our own values, a god harmless to the status quo. Such a god cannot heal our bleeding.

A More Excellent Way

Scripture, says 163:7b, is “written and shaped by human authors through experiences of revelation and ongoing inspiration of the Holy Spirit.” Scripture is rooted in the grittiness of human life and linked to God’s own life. It is both human words—slippery, imperfect vessels—and Divine Word—revealing, renewing, and opening a future for us where none was before.

We are invited, then, to a “more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31) of reading our sacred texts: deep, continuous, open-ended, charitable, and discerning. D. and C. 163 summons us to a faith-full, noncoercive, intensely human and humanizing engagement with this “tent of meeting” we call scripture, trusting God to meet us there. We are called to use every gift and skill at our disposal—scholarship, art, spiritual disciplines, tradition, community life, worship, and experience—to explore the riches of the Sacred Story. The point is to become a community whose life together, of doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly in pursuit of peace, will be a visible interpretation of scripture.