READING SCRIPTURE FROM BELOW

READING SCRIPTURE FROM BELOW

A Series of Biblical Reflections

‘The Bible is read from two places. From the place of the powerful it can be used to justify the way things are. From the place of the poor it calls that same order into question.’

– Carlos Mesters, Defenseless Flower (1989)

A Word Before We Begin

Every time we open the Bible, we bring ourselves with us. We bring our questions, our worries, our hopes and we also bring where we come from. The place we occupy in life, whether we have power or not, whether we are comfortable or struggling, whether we are included or pushed to the edges, shapes what we notice in the text and what we miss. This is not a problem to be solved. It is simply the truth about what it means to be human readers of an ancient and living book.

This series of four reflections is written with that truth in mind. It is a series that reads the Bible from below, from the perspective of those who are not at the top of the social ladder, from the vantage point of the overlooked, the silenced, the excluded, and the struggling. It reads from below not because those at the bottom are always right, but because the God we meet in scripture is consistently found in precisely those places: with the enslaved rather than with Pharaoh, with the one crying out rather than with those who have no cause to cry, with the outsider knocking at the door rather than with those who decide who gets in.

The four studies in this series cover texts from across the Bible – a short story from Exodus, a psalm, a passage from the prophet Amos, and an encounter in the Gospels. What they have in common is that each of them, when read carefully and honestly, says something that the comfortable and the powerful would rather not hear. And each of them becomes far more vivid, far more alive, when read from the direction of those who have most needed what the text is offering.

These notes explain what we mean by reading from below, why we think it matters, and what to expect from the four studies that follow. They are written so that anyone can follow, whether you have studied theology for years or are simply someone who reads the Bible and wants to read it more honestly.

I. What Does It Mean to Read from Below?

Imagine two people reading the same newspaper story about a factory closure. One of them is the factory owner; one of them is a worker who has just lost their job. They are reading the same words. But they notice different things. They ask different questions. The story means something different depending on where they are standing in relation to it.

Reading the Bible works in a similar way. The same passage of scripture has been read very differently depending on who is reading it and from what position in life. For most of Christian history, the people who produced the official interpretations, the commentaries, the sermons, the theological textbooks – were people who occupied positions of privilege: educated men, often from wealthy or ruling classes, working within institutions that had significant social power. Their readings were not dishonest. But they were readings from a particular place, and that place shaped what they saw.

Reading from below simply means choosing, deliberately, to read from a different place, from the perspective of those who are not powerful, not comfortable, not included. It means asking questions like: Who is at the bottom of the social world this text describes? Whose voice is being heard, and whose is being silenced? What does this passage look like if you are not the one with authority but the one subject to it? What does it say if you are not inside the circle but standing outside it, knocking?

This approach grew out of communities of very ordinary people, many of them poor and some of them unable to read, who gathered in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s to study the Bible together in small groups. What they discovered surprised the world: the Bible, read from their situation of poverty and struggle, made immediate and powerful sense in ways it had never made in the hands of those who had power. A Brazilian biblical scholar named Carlos Mesters spent decades listening to these communities and describing what he found. He put it simply: the poor understand things about the Bible that scholars miss, because the Bible was largely written by and for people in exactly their situation  (Mesters 1989, 4–5).

Since then, many different communities around the world have developed their own versions of this kind of reading, women reading the Bible from the perspective of women who have been silenced or overlooked (feminist biblical interpretation); communities reading it from the experience of having had Christianity imposed on them through colonial power (postcolonial biblical interpretation); people reading it from contexts of racial exclusion, economic deprivation, or social marginalisation of every kind. All of these share a common conviction: that the place from which you read shapes what you see, and that readings from the margins tend to recover things that readings from the centre have lost.

II. Why the Standard Reading Is Not the Only Reading

One thing that can get in the way of reading from below is the assumption that there is one correct, objective, neutral way to read the Bible and that the readings produced by trained scholars in prestigious institutions are that reading. This assumption is understandable. It presents itself as a commitment to getting things right. But in practice, it has often functioned as a way of deciding in advance whose reading counts and whose does not.

The truth is that no reading is neutral. Every reader brings assumptions, experiences, and social positions to the text. The question is not whether our reading is shaped by where we stand, it always is. The question is whether we are honest about it, and whether we are willing to be challenged by readings that come from places different from our own.

Walter Brueggemann, a highly respected Old Testament scholar, has written plainly about how this works with the psalms of lament, Psalm 22 is one of them, and it is at the heart of the second study in this series. He points out that these psalms, which are raw and honest complaints addressed to God, have been largely removed from Christian worship. The lectionaries, the official lists of Bible passages used in Sunday services, tend to skip them. Preachers tend to hurry past them. Why? Brueggemann argues that it is because the people who set the terms of worship have generally been people for whom complaint is not the most natural or urgent form of prayer  (Brueggemann 1986, 57–58). But for the many people sitting in those same services who are in real pain, the suppression of lament from worship sends a message: your honesty is not welcome here. The reading that is comfortable for the powerful is cruel to the suffering.

The same pattern shows up in the texts covered by this series. Take the story of Shiphrah and Puah, the two midwives in Exodus 1. Standard readings treat them as a brief narrative introduction to the story of Moses, interesting but not central. But if you read the passage from below, from the perspective of those who have no power and no institutional standing, something very different emerges. These two women are the first people in the entire Bible to refuse the orders of an empire. They are the first agents of liberation. They do it quietly, professionally, and cleverly, and the text celebrates them for it. A reading from the centre misses this because it is not looking for heroes among midwives. A reading from below cannot miss it, because midwives are exactly the kind of people it is looking for.

Or consider the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7 and Matthew 15. She is a Gentile, a woman, an outsider, everything that places her at the very bottom of the social order in the world of the text. She argues with Jesus. She refuses to accept his first answer. And the healing of her daughter is attributed, by the text itself, directly to what she said. Centuries of commentary have focused almost entirely on managing the discomfort of Jesus’s initial response. Almost no one has focused on what the text is actually saying about the woman’s argument: that it worked, that her word was the instrument of healing, that a person with no standing in the existing religious system said something that changed the course of the encounter. That is a remarkable theological claim. It becomes visible only when you read from her direction rather than from the direction of the institution managing its boundaries.

Why It Matters

This is not just a theoretical question about how to read ancient texts. It has direct and practical consequences for how the church lives and what it offers to the world.

It matters for those who are suffering. If the Bible is read in ways that do not make room for honest complaint, if lament is excluded from worship, if the suffering of the psalmist is hurried past on the way to resurrection hope – then the church sends a message to those who are in real and lasting pain: your experience does not belong here. Psalm 22 opens with the words ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Jesus prayed those words from the cross. A church that cannot pray them has cut itself off from one of the most important things the canon has to say about what faithful prayer looks like.

It matters for justice. Amos 5:24 – ‘let justice roll down like waters’ -is one of the most quoted lines in Christian social engagement. But it is almost always quoted without its context: the three verses immediately before it, in which God says the community’s worship is a stench because its social life is unjust. Read in full, the passage does not simply call for justice as something to add to the community’s life. It says that worship without justice is rejected by God entirely. That is a far more demanding claim than the bumper-sticker version of the verse suggests. Reading from below insists on the full claim.

It matters for how the church understands itself. If the standard readings of scripture consistently place God on the side of the established and the comfortable, the church will understand its primary calling as the maintenance of that establishment. But if the readings recovered by reading from below are taken seriously, if God is found consistently with the midwives, with the psalmist crying in the dark, with the prophet speaking unwelcome truth to the sanctuary, with the Gentile woman arguing at the boundary, then the church’s primary calling looks very different. It looks like proximity to those at the edges. It looks like honesty rather than triumph. It looks like the willingness to be challenged by the word from outside the circle.

None of this means that every reading from the margins is automatically correct, or that academic scholarship has nothing to contribute. It means that the conversation about what the Bible says needs to include more voices than it has historically allowed. It means that the readings produced in comfortable places need to be tested against the readings produced in uncomfortable ones. And it means that when those readings conflict, we should at least be willing to ask which one is more faithful to the God the text describes.

About This Series

The four studies in this series were written to be read by anyone who takes the Bible seriously whether you have a theology degree or have never set foot in a seminary. The language is intended to be clear and direct. Technical terms are explained when they appear. The studies draw on the work of biblical scholars and theologians, but they do not require academic background to follow.

All scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). When scholars or books are quoted or referenced, the source is noted in brackets in the text using the standard author-date format, for example (Brueggemann 1986, 57) and the full details are given in the reference list at the end of each study.

Each study follows a similar pattern: an introduction to the passage and its setting, a close reading of the text section by section, and a conclusion that brings the threads together and asks what the passage means for us. The studies are designed to be read one per week through April, but they can also be read all at once or in any order.

The four texts were not chosen randomly. Together they cover the sweep of the biblical canon, the Torah, the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Gospels. And together they make a single sustained argument: that the God of the Bible is not found where power is concentrated, but where it is absent; not in the centres of respectable religious life, but in the places those centres have forgotten to look.

V. An Invitation to Every Reader

You do not have to be poor to read from below. You do not have to have experienced exclusion or suffering yourself. What is required is simply a willingness to let those who have experienced these things shape how you read to allow their questions to become your questions, their angle of vision to inform yours.

That willingness is itself a form of faithfulness. It is grounded in the conviction that the God of scripture is not a neutral observer of the human story but a participant in it – one who has, from the very first pages of the canon, consistently shown up in the places where the powerful are not looking. The midwife’s room. The mouth of the suffering psalmist. The marketplace that the priest walks past on his way to the sanctuary. The border crossing where a foreign woman argues for her daughter’s life.

To read from below is to follow God to those places. It is to read in the company of the One who, as the Gospel of Luke puts it, has ‘brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly’ (Luke 1:52). It is to discover that the Bible, read from there, is not a smaller or a lesser book. It is a larger one.

The midwives are waiting to be named.

The psalmist is waiting to be heard.

The prophet is still speaking.

The woman at the border is still arguing.

It is time to listen.

Reference List

Brueggemann, Walter. 1986. “The Costly Loss of Lament.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36: 57–71.

Brueggemann, Walter. 2001. The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Dube, Musa W. 2000. Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis: Chalice Press.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. 1973. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. Translated by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Mesters, Carlos. 1989. Defenseless Flower: A New Reading of the Bible. Translated by Francis McDonagh. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Miller, Patrick D. 1994. They Cried to the Lord: The Form and Theology of Biblical Prayer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. 1983. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad.

Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sugirtharajah, R. S. 2001. The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Westermann, Claus. 1981. Praise and Lament in the Psalms. Translated by Keith Crim and Richard Soulen. Atlanta: John Knox Press.