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Hans Frei, who died last September at the age of 66 after a very brief illness, was never famous outside the guild of theologians. He was a perfectionist who wrote slowly and published reluctantly. In over 30 years of teaching at Yale he devoted himself unstintingly to his students, often at the expense of his own research. And what he wrote was never faddish and often technical. Yet future historians just may consider him the most important American theologian of his generation.

Speaking of a prominent theological figure, Frei once remarked in conversation, "He has all the gifts that make a great theologian except for a central passion -- but of course that's the one thing that's indispensable." Frei certainly never thought of himself as a "great theologian, " but he did have a central passion, a central idea. That idea emerged through long study, in the 1950s and '60s, of l8th- and 19th-century ways of interpreting the Bible. He grew convinced that nearly the whole of modern Christian theology, from the radical to the fundamentalist, had taken a wrong turn.

For many centuries before the modern age, most Christian theologians had read the Bible primarily as a kind of realistic narrative. It told the overarching story of the world, from creation to last judgment. Moreover, the particular coherence of this story made "figural" interpretation possible: some events in the biblical stories, as well as some nonbiblical events, prefigured or reflected the central biblical events. Indeed, Christians made sense of their own lives by locating their stories within the context of that larger story.

But somewhere around the 18th century, people started reading the Bible differently. Their own daily experience seemed to define for them what was "real, " and so they consciously tried to understand the meaning of the Bible by locating it in their world.

They did that in -- to overgeneralize -- two ways. They saw the meaning of the biblical narratives either in the eternal truths about God and human nature that the stories conveyed or in their reference to historical events. The Bible thus fit into the world of our experience either as a set of general lessons applicable to that world or as an extension of that world developed by means of critical history.

Those two ways of interpreting the Bible remain prominent. Those who set out the moral lessons of Jesus' teaching or focus on the insights provided by his parables believe that the real point of the Gospels lies in their general lessons for our lives. On the other hand, fueled by Wolfhart Pannenberg's early arguments for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection and continuing scholarly efforts to establish which of the Gospel sayings were really spoken by the historical Jesus, some Christians still tend to treat the Bible as a historical source whose value lies primarily in its historical accuracy.

Hans Frei argued that both these approaches fundamentally distort the meaning of the text. One of the Bible's most obvious characteristics is that so much of it tells stories. Now any literary critic -- or anyone with, common sense -- knows that the meaning of a realistically told story can never be reduced to a moral. The meaning of a Dickens novel is never simply the general lesson that the poor were ill-treated in 19th-century England. The particular characters and episodes of the novel are not dispensable illustrations. Similarly, to reduce to some general principle the Old Testament narratives of Israel's history or the Gospel stories of the life of Jesus misses at least part of their meaning.

On the other hand, if we try to treat these narratives primarily as the raw material for critical history, we again miss the point. To be sure, they sometimes provide that kind of historical information. But the stories themselves, in their indifference to chronology and their occasional inconsistencies, are only loosely related to questions of historical accuracy. Moreover, if we compare the fragments that a modern historian will glean as reliable against, for example, the narrative flow of the passion narratives in any of the Gospels, it is hard to deny that the historian has lost something. Aspects of character and plot development disappear in the face of the historian's questions.

The initial meaning of a realistically told story is that, within the framework of the story, certain characters did certain deeds and underwent certain experiences. When a text provides a realistic narrative, as much of the Bible does, any interpretation that bypasses this literal reading distorts the text.

Unfortunately, for the past 200 years nearly all Christian theology, Frei argued, has been engaged in such distortion. (Jewish scholars, he thought, have by and large remained more faithful to the narrative tradition.) Frei claimed not only to have identified the distortion but to have explained it: theologians have begun with contemporary human experience and tried to make connections with the biblical message. Paul Tillich defined this approach with particular clarity (and therefore in extreme form) in his "method of correlation": "systematic theology proceeds in the following way: it makes an analysis of the human situation out of which the existential questions arise, and it demonstrates that the symbols used in the Christian message are the answers to these questions. " Frei believed that those who develop theology that way, beginning with existential questions arising out of the human situation, will start reading the biblical stories as either historical raw material or timeless truths and moral lessons. Either approach loses sight of the way in which the stories function as realistic narratives.

A Christian theology that respects the meaning of the biblical narratives must begin simply by retelling those stories, without any systematic effort at apologetics, without any determined effort to begin with questions arising from our experience. The stories portray a person -- a God who acts in the history of Israel and engages in self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth. They help us learn about that person in the way that a great novelist describes a character or that a telling anecdote captures someone's personality. They provide insights that we lose if we try to summarize the narrative in a nonnarrative form. No abstract account of God's faithfulness adequately summarizes Exodus. The Gospels surpass any abstract account of God's love.

Still, the Bible is not simply another realistic novel, and its interpreters need to attend to all its special characteristics. As Erich Auerbach, a literary critic Frei much admired, once wrote of the Bible: "Far from seeking . . . merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. Christians who tell these stories, stories that are rich, enigmatic, sometimes puzzling and ambiguous, can find that their lives fit into the world they describe -- indeed, that our stories suddenly seem to make more sense when seen in that context.

Frei thought that Christian theology ought to be descriptive; it ought to lay out a Christian view of the world. That view will reflect the enigmas and ambiguities of the biblical texts, and it will be a view of the whole world. A Christian theologian, Frei explained, will therefore "do ethics to indicate that this narrated, narratable world is at the same time the ordinary world of our experience, and he will do ad hoc apologetics, in order to throw into relief particular features of this world by distancing them from or approximating them to other descriptions. . . . But none of these other descriptions or, for that matter, argument with them can serve as a 'predescription' for the world of Christian discourse." Letting any such "predescription" set the theological agenda leads to distorting the meaning of the biblical texts.

As I have indicated, Frei distrusted theologies that began with contemporary experience, and he was reticent in discussing his own religious life. He loved to talk, but he rarely talked about himself. When writing about him, one wants to respect that reticence. Still, a word about his life seems in order.

He was born in Germany in 1922, the son of a physician. His family was of Jewish background and had to flee after the Nazis came to power. He received part of his education in Britain before coming to this country and landing a scholarship to study textiles at North Carolina State University. A chance meeting with H. Richard Niebuhr led him to correspond with the theologian and then undertake seminary and graduate study at Yale. (It is fitting that his first major publication, the introductory chapters of the Niebuhr festschrift, Faith and Ethics, and his last completed lecture, read for him at Harvard during his final illness, both concerned the work of this teacher he so admired, even when he disagreed with him.)

After briefly serving a New Hampshire parish and then teaching at Wabash College in Indiana and the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, he returned to Yale in 1957 as a faculty member. Writing came slowly for him. He published the original version of The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology in a Presbyterian adult education magazine called Crossroads in 1967, but it did not appear in book form until 1975 (Fortress), the year after he published The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (Yale University Press, 1974). Eclipse traced his historical argument about the wrong turn in hermeneutics; Identity sketched what a Christology based on his principles might look like. Near the end of his life, he published a number of essays, most notably a chapter on D. F. Strauss in Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West (Ninian Smart et al., Cambridge University Press, 1985) and an essay on the literal sense of Scripture in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition (edited by Frank McConnell, Oxford University Press, 1986). Plans are afoot to publish a number of lectures he was reworking at the time of his death.

For many of his students and friends, though, nothing on paper quite captures the Hans Frei we knew, and loved: the devoted teacher; the faithful friend; a man stubborn about his ideas but genuinely, sometimes unnervingly, modest about himself; prone nervously to stay up the night before a presentation to rewrite his lecture. He was the only person I have ever known who both loved gossip and totally lacked malice.

In the1950s and '60s, when Frei was developing his ideas, many of his concerns were thoroughly unfashionable. In a number of ways, his work remains out of fashion, but it is striking that at least four of his interests now seem much more in step with the times.

Half a generation or so ago, most New Testament scholars focused on the individual sayings and stories of the Gospels. Some sought the Christian kerygma, the call to faith, in individual passages. Others evaluated each brief unit as a historical document: When would this story have been told? What does it indicate about the circumstances of its telling? Does it provide evidence about the historical Jesus? Whatever questions they asked, however, not many scholars turned from particular passages to ask about the narrative sweep or pattern of a whole Gospel.

Today, however, biblical scholars increasingly analyze the plot of biblical narratives, the way the literary forms work, the patterns of climax and tension. They often find they have more to learn from, and discuss with, literary critics than with historians; indeed, the literary analysis of the Bible is becoming a minor industry.

Frei certainly did not by himself cause that shift. It has many sources, from redaction critics who started looking at each Gospel as a whole to literary scholars like Northrop Frye and Frank Kermode who have called renewed attention to the narrative shape of biblical texts. But Frei saw the point early on, and his work remains the deepest probing of the theological implications of such approaches.

In addition to anticipating new conversations between biblical scholars and literary critics, Frei's work also pointed to new conversation partners for theologians. His suspicion of systematic apologetics might at first glance make Frei seem a kind of theological isolationist, retreating from wider circles of intellectual discussion. To those who watched him at Yale with his finger in every intellectual and political pie, such a portrait is unrecognizable.

In addition to having an ongoing interest in literary criticism, he had learned from British philosophers like Gilbert Ryle ways of talking about how the narrative of actions and events defines a person's identity. His concern for the way a community sees and describes its world led to affinities with anthropologists like Clifford Geertz and sociologists like Peter Berger. Frei said on at least one occasion that among theologians he claimed to be a historian and among historians he claimed to be a theologian -- but he avoided a complete identity crisis by being consistently clear that he was not a philosopher! On an ad hoc basis, however, he was intrigued by the parallels between his own suspicion of systematic apologetics and the suspicions concerning systematic "foundations" of knowledge growing among deconstructionists and some analytic philosophers. Sometimes the most secular of scholars found that what Frei was doing, with his attention to narrative and his interest in the language that shapes a particular community, made more sense to them than the work of many theologians much more systematically concerned to address other academic disciplines. (Jeffrey Stout's recent Ethics After Babel nicely illustrates this.)

Frei's work seems timely in yet a third way. Much of the most interesting recent work in Christian ethics discusses the way narratives shape our understanding of Christian life. Ethicists as different as Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert Meilaender and James McClendon (as well as philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre) propose that ethics is not primarily a matter of making particular decisions in isolation–what Hauerwas calls "quandary ethics." Rather, we make decisions on the basis of beliefs about what sorts of virtues seem important, what sort of human life we believe to be good. To answer that kind of question, a principle or a rule is often less helpful than a story. I may get more help in deciding how to make ethical decisions as a Christian by reading Pilgrim's Progress or a biography of Dorothy Day or Martin Luther King, Jr.-- or by reading the Gospels -- than by reading an academic discussion of medical ethics. Here, too, Frei's interest in the narrative patterns that shape a Christian life now seems prophetic.

Fourth, there is Karl Barth. Frei was not simply a "Barthian" (neither was Barth!), but Barth certainly seemed to him the best exemplar of a "descriptive" theologian who eschewed systematic apologetics and simply tried to lay out a Christian view of the world with attention to its own internal logic. When Frei was writing on these matters in the 1960s, Barth seemed to many obsolete, like a man writing a great defense of Ptolemaic astronomy two generations after Copernicus. There was some interest in his Romans commentary, but the many massive volumes of his Church Dogmatics went largely unread.

Much remains unchanged. But at times, in contrast to theologians, who try systematically to draw out the "religious" implications supposedly underlying all human experience, Barth seems to be the theologian who has taken radical secularity most seriously. At least the situation has grown more ambiguous. It is possible that, in a crazy, postmodern, thoroughly secular time, Christian theologians might discover that the old man in Basel offered us more help than anyone in thinking about how to do theology. In any event, if we do make that discovery, we will find in this matter, as in many others, that Frei was there before us.

Frei was ironic by nature, and never more so than when thinking about his own "influence." He was sometimes credited with founding a "school" called "narrative theology," but he always doubted that there was such a thing -- and would be against it if there were.

He thought the narrative character of the biblical texts had some implications for how those texts ought to be interpreted. But to try to develop some general theory of the narrative shape of human experience as a foundation for Christian theology seemed to him "first to put the cart before the horse and then cut the lines and pretend the vehicle is self-propelled." In a variety of ways, those who offered to agree with him sometimes found that he wasn't sure he quite agreed with them.

Still, I do not want to overstate that ironic spirit. He had worked a long time without many people expressing much interest in his work. In the last ten years or so of his life, his work drew attention and bore fruit. Though he may have mistrusted the taste of some of that fruit, on the whole he was grateful and happy. He was excited by Alasdair MacIntyre's early and enthusiastic review of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and later proud and pleased about a new generation of his students beginning in the early 1970s, theologians like Charles Wood and Ronald Thiemann -- proud that they had learned from him, pleased that they were independent enough to disagree with him on occasion. He continued to value his relations with colleagues at Yale like George Lindbeck, David Kelsey, Wayne Meeks and Gene Outka, and he eagerly welcomed the 1984 publication of Lindbeck's Nature of Doctrine, with its model of a "postliberal theology, " for which Frei's work is the paradigm.

Yet no one was more conscious than Frei that he had left many questions unanswered. The Bible is not just one big story, but a complicated collection of narrative and nonnarrative material. Even with straightforward narratives, in the Bible or anywhere else, a variety of critics from feminists to deconstructionists have reminded us that the meaning of a text can lie as much in what it does not say as in what it says. Frei knew that and, with a modesty as frustrating as it was admirable, was likely to admit that he did not himself know how to solve the problems even as he remained convinced that he had glimpsed an insight that was somehow true.

Beyond even such questions, a more fundamental issue remains. Frei's theology is finally church theology: it first of all addresses the Christian community and invites that community to let the biblical narratives shape its vision of the world. To what extent parts of that community will respond to such invitations may be the most important unanswered question regarding Frei's work.

"The most fateful issue for Christian self-description," Frei wrote in the McConnell volume, "is that of regaining its autonomous vocation as a religion, after its defeat in its secondary vocation of providing ideological coherence, foundation, and stability to Western culture." We no longer live in what Kierkegaard called Christendom. But old habits die hard, and Christian theologians had fallen into the habit of trying to delineate the religious dimension of our general culture. Some seem not to notice that our culture, by and large, isn't much interested. Some grow angry at the lack of interest. Some try all the more desperately to make the appropriate connections.

In a post-Christian age, however, Christianity might instead try to regain "its autonomous vocation as a religion." We Christians still have stories to tell -- distinctive stories. Stories about how God worked in the life of Israel, and God's self-revelation in the life of Jesus Christ. Stories that define a community different from the world around us because of the way these stories shape our self-understanding, a community that may sometimes be wildly radical politically and on other issues seem conservative, but will not let anyone else's vision set its agenda. Hans Frei called us to be tellers of such tales.

Whenever there's a really intense fight among American Protestants, sooner or later it seems to turn into an argument over the truth of scripture. At one extreme, some dismiss any appeal to the Bible out of hand and consider "authority" a dirty word. Others confidently assert that only their literalistic interpretations really count as believing the Bible to be true. Many of us find ourselves wandering around confused in the middle, wanting to believe in the Bible, not thinking of ourselves as biblical literalists, but unsure how to characterize our position. Indeed, much of the, notorious malaise of mainstream Protestantism derives from a perception that, to the question, "Is the Bible true?" the moderate answer is, "Well, sort of . . . " followed by either a lot of confusing talk or an embarrassed silence. ,

That perception isn't entirely false. Nonfundamentalists' discussions of appeals to the Bible have often consisted principally in ridiculing fundamentalism, without defining any clear Christian alternative to fundamentalism. I'm going to try, in limited space, to sketch an alternative way of saying, "Yes, the Bible is true."

This claim entails two secondary claims.

First: to say that the Bible is true is to say that what it means is true -- and what it means is shaped by (among other things) the genres in which the Bible is expressed, the attitudes it takes to history, and the ways cultural contexts shaped the meanings of the words that it uses.

Second: to say that this particular book is true is to say that we can trust it, trust it as a guide to faith and life which provides not only specific claims about God's faithfulness and how we ought to live our lives in response to it, but also a way of understanding the whole world and a language in which to speak about that world. These secondary claims may seem a bit complicated, but acknowledging complexity is a way not of hedging commitment to the Bible's truth but of fully attending to the complex ways in which the Bible is true.

First, then, let us consider the relation of truth and meaning. It's an obvious point, really-the truth of a statement or a book depends on what it means. Yet the point often gets lost in discussions of biblical truth. Consider the question of genre-the literary term that refers to the kind of work a particular text is. A novel represents a different genre from a work of history, which is different from a lyric poem, and so on. Different genres make different kinds of truth claims.

A work of fiction, for instance, operates differently from a work of history. If David McCullough simply made up some of 'the episodes recounted in his biography of Harry Truman, then that counts as a fraud-it's not as good a book as we thought . s was, not to be trusted after all. But if Charles Dickens made up Oliver Twist, that doesn't make the novel a lie. Since it belongs to the genre "novel," it isn't supposed to report historical facts accurately.

The distinction between McCullough and Dickens is obvious. Other cases are more difficult. If we pick up one of James Michener's big historical novels, for instance, we know we're reading a work of fiction. Most of the leading characters are imaginary But Michener is famous for his thorough research, and we'll expect that the backgrounds, landscapes and historical contexts are presented with considerable accuracy. If not, then Michener hasn't done his usual homework. If we're reading Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, on the other hand, we soon recognize that Twain is having all sorts of fun with deliberate anachronisms, and we don't expect any sort of historical accuracy. To take another example, if we're reading a movie star's autobiography, we assume it will have a more casual relation to the facts than an academic historian's biography of a British prime minister. Different genres have their different rules.

The Bible includes a variety of different genres. When we read in Luke's Gospel Jesus' story about the good Samaritan ("A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead") we are not inclined to check the story against 'the police blotter for the Jerusalem-Jericho highway patrol. We recognize that Jesus is telling a story to illustrate a moral point, and that such stories often don't claim to correspond to actual events.

The opening chapters of Genesis represent a different genre - Karl Barth called it "saga," "an intuitive and poetic picture of a pre-historical reality of history" (Church Dogmatics 3/1). Events get described which no human being could have witnessed. Animals talk. People live for centuries. We're in a different genre here from that represented by, say, the Gospel narratives of Jesus' last days or the stories of the reign of King David in 2 Samuel, which read much more like eyewitness history.

In its intuitive, poetic way, saga communicates truths about the ultimate origins of things, just as the narrative history in the Bible presents truth in a different way, stories with a moral lesson like the good Samaritan in another, and the poetry of the Psalms in yet another. "We are," Barth says, "no less truly summoned to listen to what the Bible has to say here in the form of saga than to what it has to say in other places in the form of history, and elsewhere in the form of address, doctrine, law, epigram, epic and lyric." But we listen faithfully only when we realize what genre we are encountering.

Texts often provide clues as to their genre. When a story begins, "Once upon a time . . ." we expect a fairy tale. When we flip on the television and see someone saying, "A guy walked up to a man in a bar. . ." we know we're watching a comedy club, not the evening news.

But sometimes, particularly when encountering a text from a different culture, it's hard to recognize the genre. For example, Data, the android on Star Trek, can't recognize jokes. He takes them literally, and often finds himself puzzled.

Similarly, when we read an apocalyptic text like Daniel or Revelation, we often find ourselves puzzled, not knowing how we are supposed to understand these particular texts. We're not taking their truth more seriously if we take them as literal predictions about the future, any more than Data is interpreting more accurately when he misses the joke. To misunderstand the genre is to misinterpret the text.

Somewhat different from the question of genre is the issue of how different cultures and different authors understand history and its recording. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, for example, Thucydides recounts speeches at key points in his narrative: "Cleon ... spoke as follows:..." "So Cleon spoke. After him Diodotus ... came forward ... and spoke as follows: . . . " And so on. A modem reader might expect that the reports represent something like transcripts. But in his introduction, Thucydides explains:

This explanation involves some ambiguity. Keeping "to the general sense of the words that were actually used" sounds like at least a rough paraphrase. But making the speakers say what "was called for by each situation". implies that he imposed his own view of what ought to have been said by the speaker, whether it bears any relation to an actual speech or not. It's at least clear that Thucydides, in many ways the most skeptical and careful of ancient historians, adhered to conventions of "reporting" that a modem historian or newspaper reporter would not be permitted to adopt.

Even in his classic account of the plenary inspiration of scripture, the 19th-century Princeton theologian Charles Hodge acknowledged that "the sacred writers impressed their peculiarities on their several productions." "If a Hebrew was inspired, he spake Hebrew; if a Greek, he spake Greek; if an educated man, he spoke as a man of culture; if uneducated, he spoke as such a man is wont to speak."

And, I would go on to argue, if biblical authors wrote in a culture with an attitude different to historical reporting from ours, then they wrote as the products of such a culture. The Gospels, John Calvin once remarked, were not written "in such a manner as to preserve, on all occasions, the exact order of time." "We know that the Evangelists were not very exact as to the order of dates, or even in detailing minutely everything that Christ said or did." The standards of the best modern journalism or critical history were simply not around in the first century, and it's an anachronism to expect the biblical authors to have followed them.

Regarding historical detail, then, as with respect to understanding genre, we believe in these texts most faithfully when we understand the sort of texts they are and believe what is appropriate in respect to such texts. To treat them as having an attitude to history different from what they do is not to interpret them with maximum accuracy, but to get them wrong.

Another source of confusion in interpreting the Bible, or any text that originated in a culture different from our own, lies in the different social conditions of that different time and the ways those conditions give terms different meanings. For instance, slave owners in the American South regularly cited the positive biblical references to slavery to support the ownership of slaves. But slavery in ancient Israel was a very different sort of institution. It was not based on race. Many slaves were supposed to be freed at the end of seven years, and there was a good bit of movement back and forth between slavery and freedom. Israelite slavery may have been a bad institution, but it was a very different institution from that of American slavery. It was more like the hiring of indentured servants, if one wants an American analogy. So one can’t simply transfer what the Bible says about "slavery" to an American context where the institution and the circumstances are very different and the word therefore has a different meaning.

Similar issues arise with the much-debated issue of homosexuality. We don’t know much about what forms homosexuality may have taken in ancient Israel. In some surrounding cultures, homosexual prostitution was practiced in conjunction with the worship of Baal, and Hebrew law might have condemned such activities because they were homosexual or because they involved prostitution or because they were connected with Baal worship. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 focus on the issue of male homosexual intercourse: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination." However, the word used to condemn these actions, toevah (abomination), usually refers to acts that make you ritually unclean, like eating pork or engaging in intercourse during a woman’s menstruation—in contrast, say, to actions such as theft or murder—and these condemnations occur in the midst of others that have mostly to do with ritual purity. It’s hard to be sure what .the practices were or what about them was judged objectionable

.

If two men in the contemporary U.S. (notice that the Levitical passages do not refer to lesbian relations at all) come to love each other, move in with each other and share their lives while having regular sexual intercourse, they are almost certainly doing something unlike anything anybody in ancient Israel did. The cultural context inevitably generates different practices. So when the Bible condemns some activities that were being done in ancient Israel, should we assume that it also condemns these differently contextualized activities today? I’m not sure I know the answer to that question; my point is simply that it’s a complicated question.

Similar issues arise with Paul’s condemnation of malakoi and arsenokoitai in 1 Corinthians 6:9. The first word derives from a word meaning "soft" and could apparently refer to effeminacy or masturbation. (On this and other points I am drawing on John J. McNeill’s The Church and the Homosexual and John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, though I do not accept all their conclusions.) The second is a very unusual word, which appears in Greek in this grammatical form for the first time in this letter. In its first usage outside the New Testament, in the second-century Apology of Aristides, it probably means something like "an obsessive corrupter of boys." In neither case is it obvious that the word refers to all (male) homosexuals.

For that matter, there just isn’t a word in classical Greek (or Hebrew or Aramaic) that exactly corresponds to our modern English word "homosexual," because there wasn’t anything that exactly corresponds to today’s homosexuality—which is itself, of course, a most diverse phenomenon. In part of the ancient Creek world (Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality provides the best account), it was common for young adult men to be the active partners in sexual relations with adolescent boys. The boy was not supposed to take any pleasure in the sexual act—that would be a disgrace to him— but to experience it passively as a way of expressing his appreciation for the man’s patronage. Homosexual relations represented a stage in some young men’s lives, after which they would settle down to heterosexual marriage. There are all sorts of reasons one might want to condemn such behavior, which represented at least one common pattern of male homosexual behavior Paul would have encountered in his culture—that it involved young boys, that it was not a matter of mutual pleasure, that it was a way of expressing one partner’s superiority over the other, and soon—while perhaps not condemning some of the different forms homosexual activity takes in our culture.

I’m not defending any particular conclusion in the debates on biblical views of homosexuality. Given the logic of my position, arguing for any particular conclusion would require more detailed historical analysis than I can offer here. Many recent discussions seem to assume, however, that the only alternatives are either to quote a few passages, as if what they said ended debate, or else not to care what the Bible says about these matters. I think there is an interpretive middle ground on this and many other issues: to figure out the real point of biblical passages, understood in context. I’m not sure how the debate on homosexuality would turn out if defined that way, but I believe it would be more edifying than many recent discussions of these matters have been. And in proceeding in such fashion, we’re not watering down our fidelity to what the Bible says. On the contrary, by trying to understand its meaning better, we’re trying to be more faithful to it.

To understand how the Bible is true, therefore, we must understand its genres, recognize its attitudes toward the reporting of historical details, and consider the social context in which it was written. This much could be said about any text of sufficient complexity.

All this makes understanding the Bible sound very complicated. It may also seem that the truth of the Bible is getting lost in a morass of qualifications. The issues are complicated, but we needn’t despair of finding biblical truth because, finally, we can trust the Bible. In this respect, Christians read the Bible differently from the way they read any other book.

Some years ago, Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson wrote a book called Can We Trust the New Testament?—and "trust" provides a good category for thinking about the special attitude Christians take to this book. When we trust people, we recognize their jokes as jokes, their metaphors as metaphors, and their fishing stories for the tall tales that they are. We also recognize that on the things that really matter, they won’t lead us astray. So with the Bible. With all qualifications duly noted, we can still think that, as a guide to Christian faith and life, it won’t lead us fundamentally astray. Turning the question "Is the Bible true?" to a question of trust is faithful to the Bible itself, for the Hebrew word we translate as "truth" carries the connotations of "trustworthiness" or "steadiness" or "faithfulness." The true person, in Hebrew, is the one you can trust—and so the true book as well.

Why should we trust this book in particular? That’s a question that admits of no short answer. In part, we trust the Bible because we find that it keeps making sense of the world in which we live. Using nearly every genre and every attitude to historical detail imaginable, the Bible lays out a richly diverse vision of the world, from beginning to end, and says, in effect, "This isn’t some imaginary world, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth. This is the real world, the only one there is. So if you buy into this basic picture of things, then anything real has to fit somewhere into this framework. Your life and the events around you thus will make sense only as they have their place within this grand story."

And Christians find that, if they keep reading this book and live their lives in the context of the community that reads it, that promise keeps getting fulfilled, albeit always tentatively and incompletely. The categories the Bible uses, the models it offers for understanding human life and the world around us, and the God about whom it tells can seem at first strange, but we find them ever and again providing clues that put together pieces of our fragmented world in unexpected ways.

Perhaps the most important element in this mix is that we trust the Bible because we have come to trust the God about whom it tells us. The process of coming to this kind of trust moves in a kind of circle: we trust in that God in significant part because of what we learn in the Bible. It’s a mistake to look for a single entry point into this circle. No one doctrine provides the foundation on which we believe all the others. We find ourselves trusting, in the way we sometimes find ourselves in love, without being able to define the steps that led to that state, and the elements that shape our trust are tied together in complicated ways. Even a complete systematic theology will not fully explain such matters, but it follows that we cannot work out even a fairly good doctrine of scripture without, for instance, a doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and then, in turn, a doctrine of the Triune God. If the Bible invites us into the world it narrates and describes, it also gives us a language in which to think about the world. The experience of finding yourself thinking in a previously foreign language offers another analogy for what it is like to learn to trust the Bible. Moving into a new culture or learning a new skill often involves learning a new language. To understand Japan, I need to learn Japanese. To become a lawyer, I need to learn the vocabulary of the law. When I learn these new languages, I’m not just acquiring a new stock of words; I’m learning to think in a different way.

Christians today often think of their world in the vocabularies of contemporary politics or popular culture. But the Bible offers us an alternative. Those poor folk across town are not just "welfare recipients" or even "fellow citizens"; they’re. "neighbors." That action wasn’t just "inappropriate behavior" or even "crime"; it was "sin." When we use such a vocabulary, we find ourselves thinking about the world in different ways—and sometimes, at least, we may find common ground with other Christians from whom we were divided when our only language was that of contemporary politics.

To trust the Bible, to let it define our world and provide a language for thinking about the world, can transform our lives. But it does not make understanding the Bible easy. We have to get down to hard work—to reading the Bible and immersing ourselves in its world and its language. We need to know the Bible well enough so that, as was true for Augustine or Luther or Calvin, one passage reminds us of another that offers a qualification, another that provides support, another that sets out a different frame of reference.

Such immersion in the biblical world and its language leads to much richer interpretation than either quoting proof texts or picking and choosing passages we like. When we really know the Bible, we realize its complexities, its diversities, its ambiguities. One of our problems these days, whether we are "liberals" or "fundamentalists," is how few of us can do that. Fundamentalists quote a single proof text to settle the matter, and liberals can’t remember any passages at all. If we are to get beyond such a state of affairs, we will have to study the Bible much more seriously. But if we believe the Bible is true, if we really trust it, we ought to be willing to do the work.