The Lutheran, September 2008
A monthly column by Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson
Biblical fluency
Book of Faith 'not simply another' Bible study
It was a powerful moment filled with emotion, memory and hope. I had not heard my dad’s voice in more than 20 years since his death in 1975. Even in the last years of his life, his voice was faint, his words often unintelligible because of Parkinson’s disease.
Then someone sent me a tape of my dad leading Bible studies with a group of pastors in 1956. With a mixture of anticipation and foreboding, I sat down alone to listen. I heard my dad’s clear, strong reading of Scripture and the word’s obvious life-giving power for him, in him and through him. Tears began to flow down my cheeks. They were tears of sadness but also of gratitude for my dad’s love and clear witness to the faith.
Perhaps you remember a particular voice that moved you this way in a moment of singular clarity. Was it the first word of a toddler? Is it the tenderness in the voice that your truest friend uses to comfort you?
Certainly you want to understand what this voice is telling you. But don’t you also yearn for something more—to attune yourself to this voice in such a way that you hear not just the meaning of words, but that you also experience the fullness of this voice and the rich relationship with the person who speaks it?
Attuning to the voice, attending to the person, involves entering into a conversation where you listen for the rhythms and inflections, the idioms and songs, so that eventually you not only understand them but can speak them in return—laughing, singing, whispering, tenderly, joyfully, at the top of your lungs and in the hour of death. To say it another way, with those whom you love, you become fluent. You learn to speak for their ears and sing in their voice so you can live most fully with each other.
In the Book of Faith initiative, we as the ELCA have committed ourselves to “becoming more fluent in the first language of faith,” the language of the Scriptures. With our partners in ministry at Augsburg Fortress, Publishers, we will be making available a Lutheran study Bible and educational resources.
But this initiative is not simply the release of another Bible study curriculum. Rather, Book of Faith is an invitation to become fluent, to hear more clearly the fullness of God’s voice and the voices of God’s people in the Scriptures, to experience their voices as those of beloved companions in faith. It is an invitation to attune not just our intellects but our whole lives to their voices. It is an invitation to listen not simply for the meanings of verbal constructions but for the unmistakable imprints of Jesus’ voice and the songs of his ransomed people—solemn laments, ringing fanfares and sweet harmonies.
The Book of Faith initiative is an invitation to enter so deeply into conversation with the voices of Scripture that their language becomes your own. Scripture’s tenor and rhythm becomes yours. It happens because you yearn for the heart of God. It occurs when you “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16).
The Book of Faith initiative is more than an exhortation to read your Bible. It includes helpful resources for understanding the Scriptures, but it is not only that. The path to fluency in the first language of faith will include gaining skills and practices, learning the ways we can carry the very words of Scripture in our heads and hearts, learning how the stories and words of Scripture can live on our lips and the tips of our tongues.
The path to fluency is personal and communal. It is born of the promise that “[t]he Bible is God’s powerful book of faith—for faith, from faith, in faith” (Opening the Book of Faith, page 4).
This fluency is not one thing among many in our life and mission. It is the first language by which we do all things.