"The Ouija Board Bible"

When I was a kid there was a popular game called Ouija Board. The board was printed with letters, numbers, and symbols to which a movable indicator points supposedly in answer to questions put by participants at a séance. The fingers were placed on a pointer that moved about the board to spell out messages the board was sending to the participants. To my dismay I discovered that the only messages I ever received were the ones I sent to myself. That is, I tended to find on the Ouija Board exactly what I was looking for.

It occurs to me that something similar is now going on in the name of biblical interpretation. There is a popular, widely-held notion that if I just let my fingers wander through the Bible, much like a séance I can summon up God’s presence to give me just the word I need, or perhaps more to the point, just the word I was looking for. I sometimes hear people say: “The Lord gave me a verse,” and then they’ll quote a verse of the Bible, completely without context, as though the Divine Voice bypassed the inspired author and spoke through the pages and across the centuries directly to them, unfettered by the difficult and laborious business of biblical interpretation. How convenient.

But when evangelical Christians talk about the inspiration of the Scripture, we mean that God’s Spirit spoke through (which is what “inspiration” means) particular biblical writers who lived long ago and far away in another time and place and culture, and who spoke another language, who held a very different worldview from mine, and who did the best they could to interpret for their audience what they heard God saying to them. That is to say, when I read the Bible today, I am overhearing a conversation not originally intended for me but for someone else. And yet when I eavesdrop, as it were, on that conversation long ago and far away, it occurs to me: “You know, I think I hear a word of God in there for me too!” This latter phenomenon is what we call illumination rather than inspiration. Only the biblical writers were inspired. But when we “overhear” those inspired biblical writers speak God’s word to someone else who lived long ago and far away God’s Spirit continues to speak, across the centuries and cultures and languages, through those inspired writers, an authentic word of God for us too. But notice: that will only happen when I give appropriate attention to the original, inspired author’s message and meaning. The Bible doesn’t mean whatever I want it to mean, or whatever I happen to find there; it means, first and foremost, what the inspired writer meant when he wrote under the inspiration and moving of the Holy Spirit.

And so, if I’m really interested in hearing a word from God, and not just my own little voice echoed in the pages of the Bible, I must first ask, “What did it mean?” before I can move on to ask, “What does it mean?” (to quote Harvard Dean, Krister Stendahl) and that question takes me into the difficult, demanding, and disciplined world of contextual, historical, biblical interpretation. Anything else, and I may as well be playing Ouija Board.