Isaiah 6:1-8 and Psalm 29  • Romans 8:12-17  • John 3:1-17

I’ve been taught, in very clear terms, not to read Isaiah 6 as a passage about the Trinity.

I’ve been taught, in very clear terms, that I should read Isaiah 6 as a passage about the Trinity first and foremost.

I’m old enough now to think that both of them are likely the right approach.

I think with some frequency about how we receive the Bible and how we should receive the Bible. For fourteen years I was a professor at a Christian college, and I taught dozens of sections of the college’s required senior theology class. (That course has been discontinued, along with the required Biblical-studies classes for everyone except for ministry majors. That still disappoints my Protestant heart.) So I’ve had hundreds of conversations with hundreds of young adults about the Bible and the ways that we read the Bible. I also teach the adult Sunday School class at Bogart Christian Church, so I’m in conversation with folks my age and older about the ways that we receive the gift of Scriptures.

In theological education, the Old Testament is always contested territory: Biblical studies tends (with exceptions) to favor a kind of study whose aim is to imagine as precisely as possible who and where the first readers of any given text might have been and to give their reading experience priority, taking a humble place as an eavesdropper on a conversation among God’s faithful in an age that had their own concerns and their own faith and their own crises of faith. Ours is not to insist that the text speak to us but to hear what the text might have said to those eighth-century BC Jerusalem hearers (in the case of Isaiah 6), to note the radical differences, and only then to think about how we enter into a tradition that also, secondarily, receives this kind of text.

On the other hand, theologians who read a lot of Patristic books tend (with exceptions) to read Isaiah first and foremost as the Church’s book, and that means the Church of the ecumenical councils.

Do the Seraphim say “Holy” three times?

Father. Son. Spirit.

Start there.

To its credit (even though this is not my “home” territory, intellectually speaking), this approach does avoid certain temptations to craft the first auditors in our own image, and it less frequently (with exceptions) maps 21st-century politics onto 8th-century BC texts. (If nothing else, it’s very honest about its project of mapping 5th-century AD politics onto the same.)

In certain spans of my own Bible-reading, I’ve definitely favored the Biblical-studies reading, though at times I’ve preferred the insulation from appropriation provided by the much more context-rich Patristic reading. And today, at 47, having spent nearly thirty years involved in the disputes and the other conversations over reading, I appreciate Walter Brueggemann’s approach to Biblical texts far more than I knew how to appreciate it when first I read his Theology of the Old Testament for the first time back in the fall of 2000.

Brueggemann’s approach in that wonderful book (which I’ve read four times and taught to ministry students at my former college) starts by taking seriously the plurality of Biblical projects. Wisdom literature, prophetic oracles, royal chronicles, Psalmic poetry, Exodus narrative, and other kinds of Biblical texts have their own theological centers, political assumptions, calls to repentance, celebrations of divine goodness, and other particularities. Any pair of them might stand in profound and even radical tension with each other, with one of them emphasizing divine freedom and another divine consistency or one of them proclaiming divine blessing on the monarchy and another insisting that the monarchy began not as a gift but as one of Israel’s ancestral sins. They differ. Brueggemann proposes that the best way to receive such a collection is to learn all of it well enough that, in any given moment, God might speak to us in images and idioms that pull us away from the idols of the moment, whether we would elevate our triumph or our despair or our particularity or our conformity to a place where it becomes something that Kenneth Burke would call an ultimate term, an evaluative standard in terms of which we reduce the complexity of the world.

Expanding on Burke’s work, Richard M. Weaver called such ultimate ideas “god-terms.”

For Brueggemann, God’s freedom demands that we hold onto our ideas loosely, lest they distort our vision and turn our ideas of God into idols, those images of God that the Torah forbids. And that demand has led me to a place where I can appreciate both the Biblical-studies and the patristic approaches: in any given moment in the life of God’s people, we might need reminders that our calling really is particular: the Christian reading of the Seraph call really should emphasize that the God we proclaim, as Father and Son and Holy Spirit, shapes the ways we read our sacred Scripture and also the ways we proclaim the goodness of God in the fullness of the earth. In other moments, when our sense of God’s grandeur leads us away from the love of neighbor that listens to neighbor, we might need reminding that even God’s oracles came to people very, very different from us before we Christians got them, and we’d do well at least to imagine charitably what these words might have sounded like to readers and hearers not from our community, at least not directly.

To live between those kinds of reading can be exhausting, to be sure, but for the moment, such is the best notion I have of how to live well as God’s people, reading God’s Scriptures, moving about in God’s world, proclaiming God’s goodness.

If you’re one of the longest-running readers of The Christian Humanist, you might remember that I used to write these posts with some regularity years ago. Now, in 2024, starting with Trinity Sunday in Year B of the Lectionary, I’m going to try to do some more Bible-writing.

Part of this project stems from my own circumstances: as many of you know, after 14 years as a professor at a Christian college, I’m now teaching high-school English at a public high school, so I don’t get to have the conversations day to day that I used to have with young believers and their lives with these texts. And related to that but not directly caused by it, I’m also standing for ordination in the Disciples of Christ, so I want to start reflecting more regularly, in writing, on these texts.

I’d like for these reflections, which will follow the Revised Common Lectionary, to be useful to folks, so if you know any preachers or Sunday-school teachers who follow the lectionary, point them this way. I’m going to try to get a good running start going this summer so that I have momentum going into the next school year. Here’s hoping.

Featured Image Source: Latimore, Kelly. Trinity, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57123 [retrieved May 17, 2024]. Original source: Kelly Latimore Icons, https://kellylatimoreicons.com/.