One Sunday, my Methodist minister wife made a mistake in preparation. She didn't glance at the assigned psalm text before she stood up, in worship, to lead the church in reading responsively.

Psalm 137 begins innocently enough, beautifully even: "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion." This is the kind of language church people expect from the Bible: pretty, exotic, comforting—in short, religious, in the modern sense of dealing with feelings. But by the end of the psalm things have taken something of a turn: "O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he … who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks."

From my pew I watched my wife's expression change from that of the non-anxious presiding presence they taught us to be in seminary to that of someone who'd just swallowed a frog. Then the organ struck up the doxology, she turned to face the cross, and led the church in praising the God whose Word just blessed the smashers of babies' heads.

What was that all about? Christians are those who gather Sunday by Sunday not only to praise God but also to heed God's word in Scripture and shape their lives around it. Most mainline churches end our ponderous biblical lections with the concluding phrase, "This is the word of the Lord," and everyone mumbles, "Thanks be to God." Evangelicals go further, calling Scripture "inerrant" or "infallible." Catholics and Orthodox will process into worship with a gold-covered or otherwise splendidly decorated Bible just behind the cross, the priest will raise incense before the Word, and the people will bless themselves before hearing it. Our liturgical gestures suggest we are people with high esteem for this one book. So what do we do when the book is, well, not so edifying?

Ever since Martin Luther pulled the Bible and the traditions of the church apart by playing the former off against the latter, we have had problems. The Reformed tradition described the Scriptures as clear, "perspicuous," intelligible to any reader. They meant, of course, to stand in contrast to a Roman Catholic suggestion that only ordained, Latin-reading, Mass-mumbling priests could read God's word. But if Scripture were so perspicuous, why did Calvin have to write the multivolume Institutes and a library of commentaries to tell us what it meant? And why have subsequent generations of Protestants, each insisting they were following the Bible, shattered like so many pieces of smashed glass into a bewildering variety of denominations? It's not obvious that the result is a more biblically literate population among Protestants. The Bible sits atop bestseller lists but often gathers dust on believers' shelves.

Biblical hermeneutics is the scholarly discipline that attempts to wrestle with the intersection of the Bible, theology, history, pastoral practice, and everything else that matters. The books here under review suggest that there is something of a renaissance going on in the field. The narrow slice of biblical studies that has dominated hermeneutics for two centuries—historical criticism—is giving way to a proliferation of reading approaches, many sympathetic with the traditions Luther wished to cast away as so much obfuscating overlay. Intervarsity's Ancient Christian Commentary volumes have been appearing for years now, followed by similar ventures from Eerdmans (The Church's Bible), Brazos (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible), and Blackwell (Blackwell Bible Commentaries). Ventures like these show that we are learning again to read the Scriptures with the help of the ancient church fathers, and the result (ironically enough, given the ancient church's anti-Judaism), is a more Jewish form of biblical hermeneutics. The Jews know they can't approach Torah without doing so through the Writings, the Prophets, and centuries of midrash. In one famous image, the words of the rabbis are like the white space in between the black marks on the page of the Torah.

So too, growing numbers of serious Christian readers of the Bible have become persuaded that we can't hope to know what Moses "means" without seeing how he was read by Jesus, Paul, Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Newman, and Barth. The particular lineup of midrashic commentators can change, of course. The point is the exegetical humility of reading the Scriptures through the saints—an appropriate response to the humility of a God who bends toward us in Christ and gathers his people in a communion of saints. The real question will be whether and how this way of reading takes root in local pastors' preaching and in lay people's expectations. For if it remains interesting only to scholars, then it deserves to be flicked away, like a barnacle on the hull of the church's ship. But if we can add a few more saints to lists like the one I gave above (my grandmother, say, and a few old ladies from the churches I've served), then we may be on to something. As St. Athanasius famously said, "If you want to know the minds of the saints you must live the lives of the saints." The church, thankfully, has never been deprived of saints. These and similar books will help us in the mind-department.

Baker's Evangelical Ressourcement series seeks to show that the early church's import for Protestants is not less "integral" than "it is for Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy." With D. H. Williams' volume Tradition, Scripture, and Interpretation the series succeeds admirably. The book is a companion source-volume for Williams' previous book, Evangelicals and Tradition, but is plenty readable on its own.

Williams is a highly esteemed patristics scholar teaching at the Baptist Baylor University, which makes him an odd duck on several counts. And in trying to introduce his evangelical readership to patristic biblical exegesis he's taking on quite a task. Yes, the fathers were as devoted in their biblicism as any 20th-century evangelical. It's not hard to find sentiments like Cyril of Alexandria's throughout the patristic era: "Do not simply take my word when I tell you these things, unless you are given proof for my teaching from Holy Scripture." But as Williams ably shows, the fathers not only didn't believe in the Reformation slogan, sola scriptura, they wouldn't even have understood it. From their perspective, "a radically Biblicist view might easily be driven by a desire to avoid the truth of the church's teaching," Williams argues, and indeed heretical groups in the early centuries were often eager to "prove" their points by citing chapter and verse.

In a fine introductory essay, Williams describes tradition as "the memory of the church." As Augustine shows in his Confessions, we are who we are only through our memories. It is not less so with the church. Williams uses a historian's scalpel to open this wound in his evangelical patient: the Bible is not actually older than church tradition. The writings of the first fathers precede the uniting of the biblical books in one volume as we have it today (the first list of the books of the Old and New Testaments that matches our own Bibles comes from St. Athanasius in 367, though the key books were in place long before). St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of "Scripture" simply as what we think of as the Old Testament, which for him demonstrably sets forth Christ without ambiguity! Even after the formation of the biblical canon, tradition still functioned as a hermeneutical rule: "an approach for interpreting the Bible by investigating and following the ancient consensus of the fathers."

Not that that consensus is always clear. In fact, learning to read like the fathers should make our reading of the Bible a good deal more difficult. The fathers often affirm an "infallible Bible," music to the ears of today's evangelicals. But they also celebrated "points of obscurity or even contradiction" in the Bible—the very things many superficial readers today would prefer to ignore or iron out. The letter of Scripture is plain enough for all readers. But God has intentionally placed obscurities in the Bible as opportunities for spiritual growth for its readers: "because he only wants to open [the Scriptures] up to those who are prepared to look" for God's mysteries, as Williams quotes St. Augustine. Scripture is here understood in dynamic terms, as that which moves believers from immaturity to maturity, from mystification before the opaque text of scripture to induction into its mystery. And that mystery is Jesus Christ: "He is the inner logic that ties the whole of it together." Williams' words reminded me of St. Irenaeus' image of the words of the Bible being like so many tessarae in the hands of a mosaic-maker. They can be arranged so as to display something disgusting, like a fox or a dog. (Disgusting to Irenaeus and his readers, at any rate.) Or they can be properly arranged to show the image of a king. The interpreter is an artist, and Christians should judge her work on the basis of how well she has displayed the beauty of the one we worship.

Those in Reformation-based churches have often recoiled at allegory as one of the means by which the plain sense of Scripture is distorted. This is rooted in our revolt against our Catholic forebears: let them have allegory, and pretty soon they'll find the Queen of Heaven in Revelation, or prayers to the saints in 1 Maccabees. Williams ably shows that the heartbeat of allegory for the ancient church was Christological. Allegory was a means to further the church's passionate love affair with Christ through discerning his presence on every page of Israel's Scripture. Like any interpretive practice, allegorical reading can go wrong and stand in need of reining in, sure enough. But without it, something dear to the heart of Protestants is lost: the chance to see Jesus anew, now refracted through the words not only of the New Testament, but of the Old as well. And there are so many more words in the Old! This is no individual venture, as Williams makes clear; it is an intensely ecclesial, communal one, to a point that our love for privacy is scandalized: St. Egeria writes in the 4th century that before baptism the bishop asks the neighbors of those seeking baptism whether they are indeed as good and decent as they claim!

An impressive collection of essays on The Bible in Pastoral Practice demonstrates the historical rootedness of ancient Christian biblical interpretation. Those roots can either help us to imitate our forebears or they might keep us from doing so. The volume's editors frankly admit their "simple lack of knowledge" about the ways the Bible has been used in pastoral practice historically, so they've signed up an able group of historians to get them up to speed. Lewis Ayres, a patristics scholar at Emory, starts out with a bang by telling them the fathers will press against "how we characterize the boundaries of 'pastoral.'" For the fathers are certainly interested in pastoral practice: Orthodox priest Demetrios Bathrellos demonstrates a patristic spirit when he writes, "The most important 'pastoral activity' in the Orthodox Church is worship and the most valuable thing an Orthodox pastor can offer to his flock is the daily services." Ayres pushes even farther as he describes the reading of the Bible for ancient Christians as part of the process of purification and transformation of the reader's soul so as to glimpse the vision of God. "Reading" for ancient Christians was an exercise in determining how any one biblical text relates to the mission of the incarnate Word. As the reader learns to make the exegetical connection between any given text and Jesus, her soul makes progress toward seeing and loving God and neighbor aright.

Ayres constantly has in mind modern exegetical practices as he describes ancient ones, though his polemic in this essay is light (it is much more bombastic elsewhere in a body of work that is impressive for a scholar so young). He uses the description "plain sense" rather than "literal sense" of a text, lest we think, as we are wont to do, that the "literal" sense is what a historical critic thinks the text "originally meant." For Ayres, the plain sense in patristic context meant the sense a text had "for a Christian of the period versed in ancient literary critical skills." Or, more simply, it is the intention of the author of Scripture: that is, God. Exegesis is necessarily a matter of scrubbing out any perceived gap between the world of the text and that of the reader. Indeed, modern hermeneutics' obsession with the various "gaps" between the reader and the text is simply a misstep. Further, Ayres argues, texts should never be taken in isolation from each other. Biblical texts constantly interpret each other across the sweep of the canon as they direct our attention rightly toward Christ. Elsewhere Ayres often draws on the work of George Lindbeck and his influential formulation that the world of the biblical text "absorbs" the world of the reader. Ayres simply shows how it is so among the church fathers: "We can think of Scripture in the fourth century as 'the fundamental resource for Christian imagination.'" In a lovely bit of exegesis of the desert fathers, Ayres helps us to see that their constant admonitions against judgment of others' sins is a pastoral practice immediately applicable to our (or any) day.

An essay by a medievalist, on the other hand, shows this application may be more difficult than it sounds with Ayres. Roger Ellis concentrates on the life and work of Margery Kempe, the 15th-century mystic and freakish lover of Jesus who was often accused of heresy for daring to display her passionate devotion in church (of all places). Such was the life of women who challenged a bishop's authority in those days. Several archbishops in fact demanded that she stop speaking in church (she never preached, she only admonished others as a lay woman). She daringly quoted Scripture at one prelate to explain why she would not. (Uppity women were not unknown in the centuries before women's suffrage.) When Margery heard preaching she would often weep openly at the mention of Jesus' name, or shout at descriptions of his passion. (Pentecostalism was not born, only revived, at Azusa Street.) On a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Margery is anguished that no English-speaking priest is present to hear her confession. Not to worry: St. John the Evangelist appears in a vision to hear her confession, "highly strengthening her to trust in the mercy of our Lord." Margery had powerful contemporaries who, like her, would have made admirable confessors themselves, had they been allowed. Her contemporary St. Julian of Norwich quoted St. Jerome to her: "tears torment the devil more than do the pains of hell."

Ellis makes the point that Margery is just so odd, it would be difficult to apply her work or experience exactly to our own. In one way he's right. Most obviously the status of women and the power of the church have changed greatly since her time. But I hope my asides above make clear that Margery may have more to teach us than Ellis lets on with his historian's words of caution. For the saints, perhaps in their very oddity, help mediate to us the one whom Ellis describes, with a lovely borrowed phrase, as "the go-between God."

The best historical volume of those reviewed here is by the great Rowan Greer, longtime professor of church history at Yale, chronicling Anglican Approaches to Scripture: From the Reformation to the Present. Greer tells us about a dean of Chichester Cathedral who was reading the first book of German higher criticism he had ever encountered. As he read, the churchman paused to look out of his window—precisely at the moment when the spire of the cathedral collapsed to the ground! Greer himself doesn't take the lesson this far, but one might: Protestantism has always been inspired by the image of the church's collapse, which it works to avert. Luther and Calvin sought to shore things up in an effort to restore the ancient church's fidelity after centuries of faithlessness. Today many Christians, especially Greer's own Anglicans, face collapse over questions of sexual ethics and identity politics—one more chapter in a series of  collapses and narrow escapes. Greer casts a long historian's glance back to note that questions of nature divided Christians in the 18th century, questions of history those in the 19th century. We're not "over" any of these crises yet—Christians still take quite different perspectives on them, and occasionally resort to shouting. Greer's book could calm the ranting for a bit, and not only among Anglicans.

Greer begins with Richard Hooker's adage that the Anglicans did not mean to trade in papal infallibility for biblical infallibility. Anglicanism's famous via media breathes through Greer's work: the "chief characteristic of Anglicanism," he declares, is a "horror of absolutes and of infallibility." So, despite initial squeamishness, the Church of England has long embraced historical criticism. Greer cites F.D. Maurice: the church should not "take better care of His book than He has taken of it." But the via media presented here is not—as it is all too often today, alas—an apology for evasiveness. Greer is actually fairly rough on historical critics, accusing them of a Gnostic bent in their constant effort to reconstruct some world "behind" the biblical text that is then used to judge the words in front of it (which imagined world is, of course, not provable from the text itself). And Greer has a limited, but substantial, place for dogma. Trinity and Christology are the only two dogmas he finds in the ancient church, and "I should argue that both of them leave room for a range of doctrines."

Sure enough: standing firm on a few points of truth allows us flexibility to explore widely without floating off: "It would certainly be the case that one could show that certain interpretations of Milton's Paradise Lost are incorrect, but it would not follow that we can speak of a single correct interpretation." Historical criticism has a part to play as we pursue correct interpretation, so long as we remember the limits of the historian's abilities: thousands of people witnessed JFK's death, and millions have seen it replayed, but we still don't know fully what happened. Greer acknowledges the problem of arrogance in the historian's guild, though his indictment is couched in ironic understatement: "One begins to suspect that there are at least hints of what could be regarded as the captivity of the Bible by the academy." Uh, yeah.

Greer is at his best criticizing the use of "reason" as a theological category. In the Anglican tradition it is one strand of the triple cord by which theological problems are solved, along with Scripture and tradition. But today it is often reified and played off against Scripture and tradition in unhelpful ways. Early Anglicans like Sir Thomas Browne were clear that the church and reason only weigh into theological dispute on "points indifferent," on which Scripture is silent. The cord functions here more as "a method than a doctrine." That is, one does not have to believe in something called "reason" as an Anglican, but this is one process by which theological and moral decisions are made and disputes are settled. Greer is pressing against the use of "reason" that crops up frequently today in my own Anglican-offshoot (Methodist) tradition, by which one can simply toss out Scripture or tradition because one's "reason" tells one to. John Wesley wouldn't have recognized this way of thinking. Indeed, Greer cites Wesley arguing that a "reasonable" Christian is one who has had the experience of justification! This is not the Enlightenment "Reason," with a capital R, untutored by Scripture, unwashed in the waters of baptism, but rather the specifically theological habit of reasoning with the church. Or, as Coleridge put it, in the more poetic and less mechanical language preferred by the ancient church and the Anglican divines, "Scripture is like the sun, while reason is like the moon."

Greer's book is masterful at directing interpretation towards its telos in God and in the growth of holiness among God's people. With a quiet demonstration nothing like the polemical tone in which I present him, Greer's account fleshes out St. Clement's claim: "The end of Christian philosophy is to make men better, not more learned." To that end Greer closes with a long prayer from George Herbert about the Adam and Eve story. Historical critics will debate what culture this was borrowed from, fundamentalists will staunchly maintain that it really happened this way historically, liberals will muse that it reflects something about us, psychologically, deep down. But Herbert just prays: "Then didst thou place us in Paradise, and wert proceeding still on in thy Favors, until we interrupted thy Counsels, disappointed thy Purposes, and sold our God, our glorious God, for an apple." We! Yet the story doesn't end there: "Then did the Lord of life, unable of himself to die, contrive to do it. He took flesh, he wept, he died; for his enemies he died; even for those that derided him then, and still despise him. Blessed Savior! Many waters could not quench thy love." Can we write and pray like that again, please?

Braced by these historical works we can turn to the most modernist of our volumes, Engaging the Bible: Critical Readings from Contemporary Women. The title is truth in advertising: one white woman, one black, one Asian, one Hispanic, and one lesbian write about how oppressive Scripture is, shoring up "religious and social attitudes about gender, race/ethnicity, class, and colonialism." Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza of Harvard coined the term "kyriarchy" to cover all the various oppressions: "the domination/rule of the emperor, lord, slave-master, father, husband, or elite, propertied, educated man." There's a certain arrogance here, as women from what are indeed diverse personal backgrounds who now have the benefit of a Ph.D. and a professional teaching appointment describe for us how oppressed they are. Foucault would be quick to point out that all of us have power and oppress others in ways to which we're blind, but these writers play themselves the victims only.

Carter Heyward of Episcopal Divinity School is the most explicit about this. Scripture simply is not the Word of God for her. It's often just wrong, and to say so is liberating. For one cannot know God through dogma, creeds, or Scripture. Heyward is impatient with attempts to say homosexuality is not biblically prohibited: sure it is, and who cares? For "Our God loves strong, women-loving women; our sweet woman-loving God keeps opening the path before us." That's her dogma, and if Scripture doesn't square with it, then Scripture be damned. Naturally Heyward praises those who've mustered the chutzpah to simply leave "the church and its bible and broken out of bondage to biblical authority." Heyward concludes by quoting a previous book of hers for three full pages (!) in praise of the spirituality of equestrianism: a friend of hers and her horse "were generating this energy together, and it was sacred." We are critical of everything but our own idols.

These feminist authors are clearly out of step with our historian-authors, but perhaps not as much as either party might think. The feminists' cry against injustice, which as I suggest goes overboard more than once, can nevertheless provoke a properly Christian refusal to let the Bible become a historical artifact. "Intellectual neutrality is not possible," Schüssler-Fiorenza insists, and she's right to reject modernity's fool's gold of objectivity. Womanist theologian Cheryl Townsend Gilkes praises the way black slaves in the United States "saw themselves as the poor man laid at the gate" in the parable of Lazarus. No gap between the text and the reading community there. Indeed the very cry against injustice that animates this volume is a cry born of the gospel. The question to ask the authors is whether "liberation" here has been redefined solely along the lines of identity politics without reference to Jesus.

The essayists in Engaging have largely set aside the difficult work of interpreting Scripture. If it's simply wrong most of the time, why bother? In contrast, the authors of Struggling with Scripture see the activities of "struggle" and "interpretation" as inseparable. The late William Sloane Coffin introduced the volume by raising the nagging suspicion among academic liberals that their benighted evangelical counterparts take the Bible much more seriously than they do. Walter Brueggemann, William Placher, and Brian Blount are nothing if not serious here. Brueggemann describes the difficult task of interpretation as a "God-given resistance to monologue." Scripture already wrestles with Scripture within the canon, as Deuteronomy re-presents God's early injunctions to the community in Exodus for Israel in a new day, for example. So too the church continues to struggle to interpret its ongoing experience as a community in love with Scripture. As we do that, the individual baggage and personal pain of the sort the feminists wrestle with can't simply be put aside. But we can submit such passions "to brothers and sisters whose own history of distortion is very different from our own and as powerful in its defining force." One ought not read this book alone.

Placher wrestles especially with biblical injunctions against homosexuality in light of the church's past obstinance over issues like slavery. And he finds way back in the 19th century a surprising helping hand from none other than that master of stalwart, unchanging Reformed orthodoxy, Charles Hodge. Hodge wrote that the Scriptures are "infallible" only "for the special purpose for which they are employed." That is, for matters doctrinal and ecclesial that lead to salvation, not for matters of science or chronology. Placher also points to the plank in the eye of those who hold the line on the church's barring of gays from ordination. Do unrepentant gossips get similar treatment? "I don't know about your congregation, but in mine back in Indiana, I am not sure we could get a session together if we enforced a limitation there!"

Struggling's authors might be broadly sympathetic with the "post-liberal" movement in recent theology, reacting against the categories of modernity to some degree. Our next two volumes react whole hog, to the point of embracing the description "postmodern," much feared in more conservative or evangelical circles. Reading Scripture with the Church is something of a foodfight between its authors, A. K. M. Adam, Stephen Fowl, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Francis Watson. Adam and Fowl are more positively disposed toward postmodernism and completely dismissive of any description of meaning as the original author's intent, as though meaning were a thing beamed magically from the original pen to our brains. Adam never tires of pointing out that if this is a text's one and only meaning, then everyone who disagrees with my account of it, both in church history and today, must simply be wrong. Fowl is adept at describing the sorts of virtues an interpretive community needs in order to be shaped in charity as it reads rather than contorted through vice.

Vanhoozer, on the other hand, speaks up for a soft view of authorial intent, set in a wide theological context: "As biblical interpreters, we are ultimately dealing with the Holy Spirit speaking and presenting Jesus Christ in the Scriptures … by means of what the human authors of Scripture have said." Vanhoozer calls his hermeneutic one of Christus locutor: "The idea that Scripture is ultimately the Son's own Spirit-borne commissioned testimony to himself, the means by which Christ exercises his lordship over the church." Feathers fly as the authors reply to one another in ways that only friends of many years, and intellectual companions close enough to disagree passionately, can do.

Our final volume tries to show what a patristically informed, theologically sensitive hermeneutic would look like in actual practice. Brazos was wise to ask Stanley Hauerwas to write its volume on the Gospel of Matthew, for his colleagues and theological companions have often criticized him for his relative inattention to Scripture. And if he has been right over the decades in his insistence that the church should allow itself no loophole in following Jesus' admonition to nonviolence, then Matthew should be his best friend. The result is the most satisfying work of Hauerwas' in some years. Forcing him to attend to the Scriptures, line by line, is forcing him to do something uncomfortable: theologians in modernity are trained not to write commentaries, but to write books and articles, he says. What Hauerwas provides us with here is, in Ephrem Radner's words, a "ruminative overlay" for the text: something to chew on to help us chew on Scripture better. Hauerwas hopes to leave us hungry to read more of Matthew and to do so better. Not surprisingly, writing the commentary has not changed his mind that the best way to read Matthew is to be a pacifist church.

Hauerwas avoids the standard historicist concerns about Matthew (i.e., the synoptic problem), though certainly he is not ignorant of these 19th- and 20th-century historical questions. He is hardly competent linguistically to write a commentary on modern grounds, yet his theological competence shines through all the more for those inabilities. He does not hesitate to elucidate a point from Matthew with a turn to John, or Hebrews, or the Psalter. Bonhoeffer is his favorite commentator here, not least because Bonhoeffer's life exemplified the way of the cross that is Christian discipleship for Matthew.

Hauerwas comments on the opening of the gospel, "The book of the genesis of Jesus Christ," by quoting the Martyrology of Jerome to the effect that on March 25, "Our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, and conceived, and the world was made." That's Christian eschatology: viewing all creation in light of Christ's crucifixion. It's the sort of eschatology that might make it a gift to give up possessions, not to marry, to find oneself in the company of the poor, and to suffer in the way of Christ. So also, Hauerwas comments on the Virgin Birth with little attention to the modernist question of whether such a miracle could happen. God created the cosmos ex nihilo. A proper reflection of this is his incarnation in a womb where there is nothing. Case closed! He refers with Robert Jenson to the resurrection not with modernist skepticism or apologetics but rather with Trinitarian reflection: "The Crucifixion put it up to the Father: Would he stand to this alleged Son? To this candidate to be his own self-identifying Word? Would he be a God who, for example, hosts publicans and sinners, who justifies the ungodly? The Resurrection was the Father's Yes." In this work, all of Hauerwas' strengths—his Christocentrism, his theological passion, his rigorous and demanding love for the gathered church—are amplified through the words of the evangelist to serve as a resource for preaching and teaching in the church. I for one am much more likely to turn here than to any more typically modern commentary for help in preaching.

So what do we do with the sort of passage my wife read that Sunday morning from Psalm 137? Churchly interpreters of all ages would let the passage have its own say first, reading it in the plain sense: Israel is in exile and is crying out in anguish to God and against its enemies. But any Christian bound by Jesus' injunctions to nonviolence (and, really, any interpreter from any faith with a modicum of a moral sense) would not take the biblical injunction literally. How to read it?

David Steinmetz, in a justly famous landmark essay in theological hermeneutics, asked this:

How was a French parish priest in 1150 to understand Psalm 137, which bemoans captivity in Babylon, makes rude remarks about Edomites, expresses an ineradicable longing for a glimpse of Jerusalem, and pronounces a blessing on anyone who avenges the destruction of the temple by dashing Babylonian children against a rock? The priest lives in Concale, not Babylon, has no personal quarrel with Edomites, cherishes no ambitions to visit Jerusalem (though he might fancy a holiday in Paris), and is expressly forbidden by Jesus to avenge himself on his enemies. Unless Psalm 137 has more than one possible meaning, it cannot be used as a prayer by the church and must be rejected as a lament belonging exclusively to the piety of ancient Israel.

I've often heard Steinmetz commend C. S. Lewis' allegorical reading, in which the Babylonian children represent the whining selfish desires in which we all wish to be seen as more important than we are. Seen in that light we should not hesitate to "bash the little bastards' brains out." Another reading from another teacher of mine at Duke: Hauerwas, in dialogue with Bonhoeffer, commends the psalms' refusal to cover over Israel's sins in piety or political whitewashing after-the-fact. There is no sweetness in the Psalter: just gritty, frank talk of Israel's sin. Only people who speak this way with God have any hope of meeting a God of forgiveness (and they, and we, do). I've heard David Ford of Cambridge preach this passage as a reflection on the "multiple overwhelmings" experienced in Western culture in the last century, wars and rumors of wars, that caused us to sit down by a strange river and weep. These are all "spiritual" readings in a sense—the psalmist did not likely have them in mind. Yet they are all surprisingly "literal" readings in that they attend with passion to the letters on the page. That they do so in light of new spiritual situations is not surprising. That they do so in such different ways is glorious: who would dare to leash God's word to one time and place and meaning that would necessarily exclude everyone else? And that the readers themselves do their interpretive work as Christians, reflecting on the words of Israel's Scripture through the lenses provided in Christ, is more defensible than many modern scholars have been inclined to suppose. Perhaps there is room for my wife, and preachers everywhere, to preach on these words, and "hear" them preached back in lives of faithfulness. Who knew?

Jason Byassee is an assistant editor at the Christian Century. He is the author most recently of Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (Eerdmans).

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