To Read Believingly

Professor L. Leenhardt calls attention to three ways of reading the Bible. Taking his start from the words of Jesus—“It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. But there are some of you that believe not” (Jn.

6:63-64)—he shows that they apply to the whole Bible. The first type of reader regards only the history contained within the Bible. He may submit the facts of the Bible to the same tests of knowledge found in other volumes. He may be said to “know” the Bible’s events.

In the second place, there is the man who regards the Bible as a book which deals with human reality. The Bible “speaks to us of man’s depths of being.” To read the Bible thus means to “understand” its per- sonal encounters. The depths of man’s being are probed.

Thus he understands himself better, because he meets men as they really are—who do not live the life of pretense. In learning what man is, he discovers what it means to be “man.” But there is a third type of reader, who may be called a “believing” reader.

He reads the Bible and sees the relation of its characters and events to God. There is no chapter in their lives where God does not appear. “Sometimes in the inner life, sometimes in exterior events, the presence of God asserts itself; whether they obey or disobey, their life always appears as the reaction provoked by God’s action.” Now the reader is probing not into historical events, nor into man’s inner being, but into that divine aspect of the Book which makes it universal.

Differences in culture and mentality fall away, and he is in the presence of the God of the Bible. He is brought face to face with God’s message, and he finds himself in the critical position in which “the irruption of an en- 150 tirely heterogeneous element places all men and all human history.” He then does not face a human opinion, but the God who speaks to men in concrete situations.

If we grant that it is God who speaks, then we are reading the Bible in faith, “believingly”—by the power of the Spirit in faith.