Study

We're not saying we invented bible study! Of course not; many others do it. But it depends on how you do it. When people say "Read the bible!" they often imply that the sense is plain, and other people simply have not read and bowed to this authoritative sense. What is frequently at stake in this kind of view is a monolithic legalist understanding of God and God's workings. So every text that fulfills this understanding--every text that suggests God or his servants will judge and destroy the wicked--this becomes the Final Meaning of God.

But those who read the bible this way simply do not realize they are applying an anthropological construct--i.e. a human way of understanding--to their concept of God. They will of course claim, to the contrary, that anyone who deviates from this standard, it is this person who is applying human understanding, while they have what amounts to divine knowledge. They are thus willfully blind to their own human lens in attributing the meaning of God.

Wood Hath Hope begins with the premise that human meaning is something that human beings have produced over history and that violence has played an absolutely key role in this production. In a nutshell, it is killing or being killed which gives final power and shape to what we believe. Now some of the bible shares in this violent thinking, but what makes the bible unique, and is the true test of divine inspiration, is that little by little, and growing over time, the biblical text holds up to view humanity's own violence, and suggests that God is not like that! What, after all, is more likely to be a revelation of the eternal God? One that goes along uncritically which humankind's great liking for killing--so God is just the biggest killer of all--or one that painfully, and with great difficulty, turns the violent eye of humanity around on itself, so that it truly sees what its character is, and then in the same instant sees beyond itself to the nonviolent God who made this turn possible?

Jesus said, "No one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." On the cross Jesus died without retaliatory violence, forgiving his enemies. Before he died he also said, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." All of which suggests that it is with Jesus that the human eye is turned finally to a nonviolent God. And this indeed is both the start and the conclusion of Wood Hath Hope's studies. We work our way through any and all biblical texts seeing there the traces of God's sustained shifting of our vision. And we can do this because we have always already begun from the first-and-final re-visioning which happens with Jesus.

This way of studying is what may be called "anthropological criticism." It says in effect that the bible is first of all about understanding ourselves before it is about understanding God. This method of interpretation comes dynamically from the scriptures themselves (think Cain and Abel), but as a critical method it has been taught us by the ground-breaking work of the anthropologist and cultural critic, René Girard. We include some of his books in the recommended reading below. But Wood Hath Hope is not a fan group of any writer or intellectual, no matter how important that person's work may be. It is strictly a group of disciples of Jesus and of the transforming human-divine truth he has brought into the world. To study Jesus is to be set free from our age-old slavery to violence and death, in order that we may live fully in love, as God has always desired.
 

Recommended Books:

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, René Girard (Orbis Books, 2001)

Perhaps the most accessible of Girard's books, demonstrating the meaning of Satan as human violence.

 

Evolution and Conversion, René Girard (Continuum, 2007)

Girard's latest book, in his most successful format--a dialogue with other scholars, providing a dramatic account of his view of human evolution as shaped by two essential moments, production of the scapegoat and revelation of the scapegoat.

 

Cross Purposes, The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement, Anthony Bartlett (Trinity Press, 2001)

One of Wood Hath Hope's founders, Tony Bartlett, lays out in this book the violent logic in standard theories of the meaning of Christ's death.

 

Stricken by God?, Eds. Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin (Eerdmans, 2007)

Contributors to this volume provide definitive rebuttal of traditional violence at the heart of theology.

 

Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, Gil Bailie (Crossroad, 1996)

A persuasive account of culture, classic and popular, showing how it is affected by the biblical revelation of violence.