The curse of the filter
When I first embarked seriously on photography, my father (a brilliant photographer) insisted that one of my first purchases should be a polarizing filter. He explained that the filter would deepen the hues of everything seen through the camera’s lens, and he was right. As far as I understand it, the filter restricts certain wavelengths from passing through it into the camera, as outlined in the diagram below:
Image: www.polaview.net
Last night I attended a Bible study with a church group. It was warm, honest, interactive and personal. However, I couldn’t help the feeling that the person who had written the study notes had read the initial text through just such a filter as the one below. The passage under consideration (Acts 16) contains some troubling political and social elements. In it, Paul and Silas are arrested for undermining commerce in the city of Phillipi, but their accusers turn this into a charge of political sedition. The next morning, when the authorities decide to release their prisoners, Paul refuses to go quietly. In one of the most politically provocative moments in his journey through Acts, he insists on his rights as a Roman citizen, and humiliates the city authorities by insisting that they come to release him in person. Far from ‘turning the other cheek’ he makes a public protest about the abuse of power by the civic authorities. With all this going on in the passage, and memories of the St Paul’s debacle fresh in our minds, what did the Bible Study focus on? Jumping off from the story of the Philippian jailer it asked about the internal prisons of fear and shyness in which some are kept. Whilst that is certainly a topic worth discussing, it seemed to be linked by only the most tenuous of threads to the passage itself.
If we allow a pietistic polarizing filter into our study of the Bible, doesn’t it reduce our ability to think theologically about politics?
Excellent point Richard – it’s something I’ve noticed but I’ve never seen it expressed before.
I’ve sometimes been shocked when discussing the Bible to see people approach it with a preformed understanding, and also an absolute belief that their understanding is the only way of seeing a passage. This applies even to people who I consider far ahead of me in terms of Biblical scholarship.
I’ve had two experiences which have had a strong influence on the way I approach the Bible. For several years, from when I was a brand new preacher, I worked with young offenders and preached and led Bible studies twice or three times a month. Many of them had no Biblical knowledge and at all and so I had to look at ever passage as it might appear to someone who had never heard it before and didn’t know who Jesus was, let alone St Paul.
I was also part of a very small prayer group which prayed through the Gospels a chapter a week – we would read the chapter, meditate for twenty minutes then discuss it. Through this, we realised how much space the gospels leave for interpretation and how hard you have to work to understand what’s happening. (As indeed Jesus’ first disciples seem to have had to work at times!)
Thanks Pam. Context has a huge impact on how we study the Bible. I once spent several months going through the Gospel of Luke in Greek with a young man whose parents had been missionaries. He had strayed away form their faith, & wanted to come back to it for himself. We tackled the original text with “no holds barred”, and he came back to faith in a very powerful way. He is now a Pastor…
Indeed…I think there are three problems here…
1. We have become so pietistic and internalised. The Bible has to be about me and my emotional health and my personal salvation. We have tended to neglect the global and sarkic (fleshly) impact of the text – in other words the Bible is meant to change the world, to change society not just to change our hearts. By making it all about us we are just revealing our consumer centred selfishness and limiting God and his word to the role of the personal coach.
2. We all polarise. We all need to filter information and boundary knowledge. Otherwise we would be into overload. Clearly it’s OK to do the occasional pietistic Bible study/preach but the issue is the longer view – what is the diet of our Bible study over a longer period – do we have a breadth of passages we cover; a breadth of styles of Bible study; a breadth of focusses – personal, local, national, social, ecological, environmental and so on. No one could expect every Bible study to do all of that.
3. Pam’s experiences focus on allowing the text to speak to us rather than impose a meaning on the text. This is a deeply spiritual form of study in that we are opening ourselves up to the Holy Spirit. We all need to do it whether we are leading a Bible Study or taking part in a study. If we are leading from the front, we need to pray God will open the Word to us before the meeting in our prep, or we run the meeting to allow for inspired reading. Although even this can be derailed by someone with a bee in their bonnet or the domineering person. I like Ignatian Imaginative Study or Lectio Divina styles which develop a more clearly open reading of the text and allow the text to speak into our lives.
Pete
I was listening to someone speaking a few weeks ago, who said we have boxed Scripture into a modern Christian world, we need to begin to look at scripture from fresh eyes, not necessarily accepting the current cultural interpretation.
This is evidenced by looking at the greek word Ekklesia, which is correctly interprested as ‘called out ones’ however we need to examine the meaning of the word as used when the Scripture was written. The Ekklesia of those times where a group of people charged with the town, city of province wellbeing.
Great post. The psychologising effect… quite interesting and demanding on a grand scale (Schleiermacher, Bultmann etc) but a bit of a menace on the small scale, making us interior and self-referential, and making God God of the private and domestic sphere. Bloomin’ Descartes again?!
Very happy about your point, not so sure about the physics in the first paragraph.
The wavelength relates to the colour. All colours are waving in all directions in unpolarised light. The polarising filter removes the waves vibrating in non-prefered directions (as shown in the image), reducing the intensity of the light. I don’t know enough about photography but I guess this is what improves the quality of the photo.
Thanks Michael – physics never was my strong point!