Living Documents

I recently read a person reflecting on whether the Constitution was a living document or not. The article was less about the Constitution and more about a particular challenge to it. The writer raised an interesting question.

So much, I think, of the written word, is alive. Words have a way of coming back and reminding us of things all the time. Some documents, however, are, by necessity, living documents because people make choices to live by them. The Constitution is a living document, constantly reflected on and analyzed and interpreted. The greatest living document of all, I believe, is the Bible.

How one approaches a living document is important. For a document to be alive and treated alive, three approaches must be made.

First, what do the words actually say?

What makes the Bible challenging with the words is that the words are always translations of other words. Jesus and the people around him spoke a street language called Aramaic. It was less a formal language, not really a written language, but the casual language of the average person on the street. In the New Testament the words that were recalled spoken in Aramaic were translated into Greek, ancient Greek, and in the English Bible those words are translated again into American English.

This doesn’t, obviously, dismiss the words, but it requires some serious looking at the words and what they say and what the original language was stating.

The second aspect of this is reflecting on from whence the words or the thoughts came? Years ago in theology we were taught to see what the “sitz in leiben,” the situation in life, was. What was the history, the culture, and the understanding of the people at the time this was written?

Ancient Judaism spent so much time in captivity, nomadic periods, and exile, that it is impossible to read the Hebrew Scriptures without recognizing this. In the New Testament, any Bible Study that does not reflect on the impact of the Roman Empire on the life of the people is not a very good Bible Study.

The third aspect is to reflect on what all of this means here and now. In the context of our world, in the context of modern science, and contemporary understandings of things, what does this say to us in the here and now?

Living documents do not just speak of the past, but the speak to the present and even the future.

To me, the Bible gets abused, badly, in two ways.

The first way is that it is often interpreted by reading what the words say right here, and right now with no regard for the situation in life, the culture, or even language issues. What does it say???? What does it literally say????

The problem is that if one takes this approach the Bible becomes incredibly narrow, incredibly out of context, and frankly, incredible dead. The Bible is a living, breathing document that demands so much greater respect than to just literally take the modern words and use them however, we see fit.

The second way the Bible is abused is by trying to dismiss what it says in its totality and to treat ‘living’ as a means of saying we can use it however the wind blows. Again, this is an abuse and shows little respect. It is merely using the third part of the equation to the here and now, and dismissing the words.

For a document to be living and breathing, all the parts have to be taken into consideration, words, context, and application.

Is the Bible a living document? If it is not, than what is the alternative to living?