Articles

• The Bible and the Qur’an as Scripture
• The Healing Power of The Book of Common Prayer
• Anglicanism: a Union of Opposites
• Psychology and the Bible: Freud and Jung
• Thomas Cranmer: Archbishop, Liturgist, and Martyr

            Forty years ago, if I had stopped someone on the street and asked what was meant by “scripture,” the answer I almost certainly would have received would have been, “Why the Bible, of course!”  Today scripture has come to mean, more broadly, the sacred writings of all the world religions, and probably no single individual has had more to do with this shift in meaning than Wilfrid Cantwell Smith.  Professor Smith served for nine years as Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University.  After his retirement he returned to Canada, where he was appointed Senior Fellow at Trinity College, Toronto. 
            Professor Smith had specialized in Islam, but he was also an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada.  In response to a short paper of mine,^[1]  he remarked that, in his view, the historical interpretation of scripture is pre-scriptural, and the literary interpretation of scipture is post-scriptural.  What, then, I asked myself, is the scriptural reading of scripture?^[2]
            The beginnings of Christianity were associated with an effort to reclaim, by a new way of reading, the Jewish scripture which was the only scripture known to the infant church.  The Christian movement was grounded in the memory of Jesus of Nazareth and  the Easter experience, but neither of these foundational influences could be found mirrored in scripture, if scripture were read in the traditional fashion.  On the other hand, large sections of scripture, especially those concerned with Jewish cultic observance, had limited relevance for the Christian church. 
            In time, of course, the church would create its own scripture, out of a varied assortment of sectarian writings.  But before this came about, the use of allegory, already exploited by Jewish writers like Philo of Alexandria, was implemented with great ingenuity and sophistication to turn the Jewish scripture into a Christian book, the “Old Testament.”  The result of this hermeneutical approach was summarized by Augustine in the aphorism: “in vetere novum lateat, et in novo vetus pateat.”^[3]
            Such innovative reading was not proper to the Christian movement.  The destruction of the temple and the end of the Jewish sacrificial system meant that Judaism too needed to read its scripture in a new way.  As Prof. Smith observed in a lecture on “Jewish Scripture,” “The Talmud cannot be read as a commentary on the Bible, but the Bible could be read as a commentary on the Talmud.”^[4]
            Religious experience, to the extent that it can be expressed linguistically at all, is apt to use the language of identity, union, or relationship.   The keynote of the ancient Upanishads is expressed in the aphorism, “That are Thou.”^[5]  The Johannine Jesus declares, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30),  The Song of Songs, which has been given a mystical interpretation in both Judaism and Christianity, exclaims, “My beloved is mine, and I am his” (2:16).
            The function of rational discourse, on the other hand, is to discriminate.  The Genesis story of the ascent to consciousness reaches its climax in the divine knowledge of good and evil (3:22), and this achievement of ethical discernment exemplifies reason’s power to declare: “this is not that.” 
            Discursive reason and language dominate both the theological and the historical uses of scripture, which, for that very reason, frustrate the use of scripture in its unitive capacity of mediating a relationship between the believer and “the true light that enlightens every man” (John 1:9).  Historical criticism, in particular, has been called “the death of scripture.”^[6]  It is the task of the scriptural interpretation of scripture to arrow images beyond the logocentric consciousness of doctrinal and historical interpretation and so to clear space for that experience of expanded consciousness which, in the Christian tradition, goes by the name of “revelation.”
            There is a notable difference in the use of the Bible and the Qur’an in their respective communities of faith: the reliance on translations.  When Hebrew had declined as the spoken language of the Jews, not merely in Babylonia but also in Palestine, oral renderings into Aramaic of the Hebrew texts led to written Aramaic translations or targums.  At the time the Prologue to the Wisdom of Sirach was written (ca. 116 B.C.), the bulk of the Old Testament was already circulating in Greek in the translation known as the Septuagint.  (Its later use by the Christian church led Jews to regard it with suspicion and to return to the original Hebrew.) 
            Besides the Coptic and Ethiopic versions, the Syriac Bible has acquired special interest as a possible source for portions of the Qur’an.^[7]  For centuries the Latin Vulgate was the official Bible of the Western church. 
            In the 16th century vernacular translations were associated with heresy: the books were burned along with their translators.  But today ordinary Christians, Protestant and Catholic, know the Bible exclusively through the vernacular. 
            In Islam, however, only the Arabic Qur’an is considered to be the Qur’an;  translations are called “The Meaning of the Qur’an” or “The Interpretation of the Qur’an.”  Muslims who recite the Qur’an must fulfil this obligation with the original Arabic text.  But of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, the majority do not know Arabic.  Arabic is not the language of Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, or the Sudan.  Reading the text without understanding the language is a difficult problem. 
            A retired army officer from Pakistan, Syed Kairulbashar, hit upon a solution: he came up with a system of simple letters, color coded to guide the reader through proper pronunciation when reading the Qur’an out loud, as Muslim tradition requires.^[8]
            The fact that most Muslims recite their sacred scripture without understanding what it means may come as a surprise, or even a shock, to Westerners.  But it recalls the Latin Mass, which most in the congregation could not understand.^[9]  In the nineteenth century the ancient Vedic hymns were recited by heart by Brahmins who had no understanding of what they meant .^[10]
            The Muslim experience teaches us that hearing or reciting an archaic sacred text touches us at a deep level, whether we understand it or not.  Rationalist Muslim thinkers like al-Farabi (10th century), Avicenna (11th century), Averroes (12th century), al-Ghazali (12th century), Ash-Shatibi (13th century), and Ibn Khladun (14th century) played a critical role in the development of Western thought.  But rationalism has not intruded on the experience of reading the sacred text, which can be described as an act of communion.^[11]  Therefore, the Qur’an is a source of revelation for devout Muslims.  Of how many Western Christians can that still be said of their reading of the Bible?
            The scriptural reading of scripture raises the issues of language and sound.  When I asked the journalist from Dubai who was seated next to me in Arabic class what she got out of reading the Qur’an when she did not understand what it meant, she replied: “It’s God’s holy language!”  Biblical critics have always been interested in the ancient languages in which the Bible was written: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek,^[12] but I am unaware of any group in either the church or the academy which interests itself in the language in which Christians today read and hear the sacred scripture.  This explains the reaction of T.S. Eliot, an uncooperative recruit in the 1950s to the commission for the updating of the Psalter.  He found the translations of the New English Bible (1961) “something which astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic; we ask in alarm: ‘What is happening to the English language?’”^[13]
            True religious language, Evelyn Underhill observes, “enchants and informs, addressing its rhythmic and symbolic speech to regions of the mind which are inaccessible to argument, and evoking moments of awe and love which no exhortation can obtain.  It has meaning at many levels and welds together all those who use it, overriding their personal moods and subduing them to its grave loveliness.”^[14]           
            The enchantment of sacred language was far from the mind of the eminent New Testament scholar, Dennis Nineham, when he wrote, in defence of the New English Bible, “[People] did not go to church primarily for an aesthetic filip, but to worship God and to hear the Word mediated to them through the Bible, and therefore surely the first question was whether that was as good an instrument as they could find for purveying the meaning of God’s Word and allowing that Word to have its maximum impact.  That was the question which should be uppermost in their minds and not questions about whether the NEB was as beautiful or as dignified as it could be.”^[15]
            This face-off between T.S. Eliot, the poet, and Dennis Nineham, the Biblical scholar, epitomizes the issue of language in liturgy and scripture: is its function simply to “purvey meaning,” (Nineham) or should it also “address regions of the mind inaccessible to argument” (Underhill)?  The dismissal of religious language as “an aesthetic filip” may help explain why “more often than not the Bible is found buried on the top shelf of the bookcase in the den or covered with dust on the bottom shelf of the coffee table.  If it is read at all, it is used as a desperate treament for insomnia when drugstore medicines fail.”^[16]
            On the other hand, reading the Bible, or hearing it read at divine worship, may elicit not only cognitive but also affective responses: “feeling shivers along the spine, weeping in sympathy, or being transported in awe,”^[17] precisely those reactions which are wont to result from an encounter with the Holy.^[18]  The Bible has the power to move us, to stir our emotions in ways we scarcely understand.  As scripture, it arises out of a world of archetypal imagery, and a responsive reader is able to penetrate, through the surface level of the text, to those deep structures which powerfully engage his or her unconscious feelings.  The religious function of the Bible is not so much to inform the mind, as it is “to change the blood” (D.H. Lawrence).^[19]
              The reader who experiences the transformative reality which is mediated by the scriptural text cannot help being touched emotionally.  Indeed, it is not uncommon for the reading or hearing of scripture to result in tears or uncontrollable sobbing.  The emotional response wells up spontaneously within the reader or hearer from a deep level of the psyche.  It is a response to something not of our own making; we are not acting but being acted upon.  Something in the text has elicited feelings of enlargement, union, or emancipation which may have no specific intellectual content.^[20]    
            Such a reading experience may be of no concern to hermeneutics, but it is crucial for the reader’s transformation.  It conveys not so much an objective, communicable knowledge coming from without as a transformative knowledge coming from within.  The Bible is then functioning as the catalyst which brings the reader into contact with something beyond his or her control, something which touches us and shakes us to the core, whether we understand it or not,^[21]  and in this experience language plays a key role.
            “Purveying the meaning” (Nineham) refers to the communicative function of language.  But language also has an expressive function, by which it touches our hearts and souls; its purpose is aesthetic, rather than informational.   For the religious imagination it is the expressive function of language, at least as much as the communicative, which is key.
            Affective responses, referred to in the spiritual tradition as “consolation” or “desolation,” would seem to be the effect of powerful, sometimes disconcerting images which have been woven into the text and which speak directly to the unconscious.  A sudden change of mood, for which the reader can assign no obvious cause,^[22] suggests a psychological influence emanating from the text, a hidden quality that can no more be defined or explained than the quality of a person’s speaking voice. 
            In expressive language conceptuality is not abolished but transcended: an underlying deep structure is engaged which imaginally connects disparate concepts.  The introverted, expressive function of Biblical language is critical for any emotional, transformative reaction.  If God is known, paradoxically, in a “cloud of unknowing,” then it will be the expressive function of the Bible’s language to point towards the ineffable mystery and to dispose the reader to encounter it. 
            The expressive power of religious language helps us “feel towards God ,” in T.S. Eliot’s evocative phrase.^[23]  For religious language to function expressively, aesthetic and especially phonetic considerations are crucial.   Before the word is ever used to convey a concept, it is first of all a sound.  The power of the image, which is crucial in expressive language, includes the acoustic as well as the visual image.
            The importance of sound in reading the Bible is obvious once we consider the primacy of the spoken word in the Christian tradition.  “Gospel” meant oral proclamation, or kerygma, before it came to designate a written text, and the word still retains this older meaning today.   The Form Critics tell us that the sayings of Jesus (prefaced by the introductory formula, “Amen, amen, I say unto you”) went through a generation of oral transmission before the first written gospel was composed. 
            Christianity’s attachment to the spoken word may have something to do with Jesus’ relationship to the prophetic tradition, in which divine revelation is prefaced by the introductory formula, “Thus says the Lord….”  Although all language is ambiguous, spoken language, through personal contact and contextualization, has a directness which is lacking in the endless “deferral” of writing.  When Paul writes, “Scripture says….” (Romans 4:3), he is expressing a desire to retrieve a spoken word of revelation through a text which, strictly speaking, doesn’t say anything.
            The Christian church, like many other religions,^[24] has privileged the oral performance of scripture.  Right down to the present day, scripture has always been read aloud during worship, and in this reading sound is obviously crucial.  When scripture ceases to be memorized and recited, its vitality in the life of the individual tends to decrease. 
            Christianity began at a time when oral culture was only just giving way to written culture.^[25]  Writing was often an aid to oral performance, rather than an independent form of communication, and silent reading was virtually unknown.^[26]  Even today, when silent reading has become the norm, it is usually accompanied by involuntary vocalization. 
            The importance attributed to sound in Eastern religions should make us attentive to the phonetic dimension of Biblical language.  Mantras are words which have power, even though they have no definable meaning.^[27]  However, a disjunction between sound and meaning is rejected in Article XXIV of the Book of Common Prayer:

It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have public Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments in a tongue not understanded of the people.

            What is affirmed here of public prayer and the administration of the sacraments obviously extends to the Bible.  However, “understanded of the people” did not mean colloquial English. The 16th and early 17th centuries, which saw Coverdale’s first complete English Bible (1535), the Geneva Bible (1560), and the world’s bestseller, the Authorized Version (1611), were one of the greatest periods in the history of English literature. “Purveying the meaning” was certainly not the sole concern of the translators of the King James Bible: “It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten, which the convert^[28] hardly knows how he can forego.  Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words.”^[29]
            “This version,” Adam Nicolson observes, “has the air of irreproachable authority, which is the essence of sacred ritual.  The Translators made a ceremony of the word, turning words into a tangible experience and adopt[ing] them as markers of and symbols for the divine.”^[30]  In the King James Version you find “immediacy, dignity, a sense of deep, musical rhythm” (191).  “The spoken word is the heard word, and what governs acceptability of a particular verse is not only accuracy but euphony” (209). 
            No wonder T.S. Eliot was so entranced by a form of English religion which was both sensuous and exact.  The KJV appeals to what he called “the auditory imagination, that feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and invigorating every word.”^[31]  On Easter 2007 the TV broadcast “Sunday Morning” featured a presentation of the multitudinous versions and formats of the Bible presently available.  One of the persons interviewed was a black pastor.  When asked which translation he preferred, he replied, “The King James: it sounds more like the Bible.” 
            Today such a vox populi finds little support in main line churches, Catholic or Protestant.  Northrop Frye may have entitled his second book on the Bible Words with Power,^[32] but he failed to see that this power derives, at least in part, from the sound of religious language.  Although he had chosen the KJV as the basis for his earlier book, he did so simply because it was “the most familiar and accessible version,” and he disclaims all interest in “the beauty of its cadences.”^[33]
            Here we see how far the issue of religious language has receded from modern Western consciousness.  In rational discourse the individual uses language; in expressive discourse, language uses the individual: “Die Sprache spricht” (Heidgegger).^[34]  The acoustic images of the KJV are effective because they express the processes of the psyche more clearly than the clearest concept and enable the hearer to re-experience them.  The banishment of sacred sound from liturgy and scripture breaks the link between the two worlds, between “things visible and invisible.”
            Adam Nicolson speaks for many, I believe, when he confesses, “I am no atheist but I am no churchgoer, perhaps because these things are no longer voiced in church” (241).  The conservative text promulgates “‘the old way of doing things’ against the modern, ‘novelist’ requirement for clarity and pure light” (240).
            The topic of this paper was suggested to me by our honoree’s kind gift to me of his book,^[35]  and I was deeply touched to see my name included in the “Vorwort,” among those to whom the book was dedicated.
            It has been said that doctrine divides but experience unites.  My suggestion, in these troubled times, is that the common experience of “the scriptural reading of scripture” may serve, if not to unite, or at least to bring closer together, two faith communities whose common history has been sadly marked by hostility, mistrust, and violence.  But for this to happen, Christians must rediscover the musical and magical power of scripture’s sacred sound.  In this, I believe, the Muslim example has much to teach us. 

---

1. Reader Response: Demythologizing the Text, in: NTS 14 (1988) 232-37.
2. The Scriptural Reading of Scripture and the Coptic Gospel of Truth, in: SBL Seminar Papers (1990) 637-44.
3. Quaest. in Heptateuchum 2.73; PL 34.625. 
4. Centre for Religious Studies, University of Toronto, April 8 1988. 
5. Cf. Bribad-aranyaka Upanishad, iv. 4, 15-17. 
6. Robert Morgan with John Barton, Biblical Interpretation, Oxford 1988, chapter 2. 
7. C. Luxenberg, Die Syro-Aramaeische Lesart des Koran: Ein Betrag zur Entshluesselung der Koransprache, Verlag Hans Schiler 2007. 
8. Bringing new readers to sacred Arabic text, in: Toronto Star, October 11 2006, A3. 
9. Pope Benedict XVI has just reauthorized the use of the Tridentine Mass, without the need to obtain permission from the local bishop.  A “young, progressive Catholic” confesses, “I want to hear Mass sung in a language I don’t understand because too often I don’t like what I hear in English.”  TIME, July 30-August 6 2007, 92. 
10. W.C. Smith, What is Scripture?  A Comparative Approach, Fortress 1993, 302.
11. Todd Lawson, The Dangers of Reading: Inlibration, Communion and Transference in the Qur’an Commentary of the Bab, in: Scripture and Revelation, George Ronald (London) 1997, 171-216.
12. Schuyler Brown, Philology, in: E.J. Epp and G.W. MacRae (ed.), The New Testament and its Modern Interpreters, Scholars Press 1989, 127-147.
13. T.S. Eliot on the Language of the New English Bible, in: The Sunday Telegraph December 16 1962, 7.
14. Worship, Nisbet (London) 1937, 113.
15. Quoted in R.C.D. Jasper, The Development of the Anglican Liturgy 1662-1980,  SPCK (London) 1989, 295.
16. George W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology: Recovering the Gospel in the Church, John Knox Press (Atlanta), 1981, 26.
17. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, Cornell 1982, 39.
18. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr. J.W. Harvey, Oxford 1958.
19. Wayne Rollins, Jung’s Challenge to Contemporary Hermeneutics, in: Murray Stein and R.L.Moore (ed.), Jung’s Challenge to Contemporary Religions, Chiron 1987, 114.  Spinoza expressed the same thought: “its [scripture’s] object is not to convince the reason but to attract and lay hold of the imagination.”  The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, R.H.M. Elwes (tr.), Dover 1951, vol. I, 91. 
20. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Fontana (London) 1975, 410.
21. E.C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest, Princeton 1978, 83.
22. Cf. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, tr. A. Mottola, Doubleday 1964, 133.  Ignatius refers to psychic changes which come about “without any previous perception or knowledge of any object.” 
23. The Social Function of Poetry, in: On Poetry and Poets, Faber and Faber (London) 1957, 25.
24. Harold Coward, Sacred Word and Sacred Text, Orbis 1988; William Graham, Beyond the Written Word, Cambridge 1988. 
25. Paul Achtemeier, Omne verbum sonat: The New Testament and its Oral Environment in Late Western Antiquity, in: JBL 109 (1990), 3-27.
26. Ibid., 15-17.  This was true even of solitary readers.  St. Jerome complains in one of his letters that he is unable to read, because he has a sore throat!
27. Howard Coward and David Goa, Mantra, Anima Books (Chambersburg, PA) 1991. 
28. Frederick Faber was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, a few weeks after John Henry Newman. 
29. Quoted in Stephen Neill, Anglicanism, Oxford 1977, 135n.
30. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, HarperCollins 2003, 232.
31. Ibid., 223.
32. Penguin 1992.
33. The Great Code, Academic Press Canada 1982, xiii.
34. “Language speaks.”  Language, in: Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row 1971, 190.
35. Joachim Gnilka, Bibel und Koran: Was sie verbindet, was sie trennt.  Herder 2004.

back to top