In seminary the person studying for the ministry is taught how to exegete Scripture. That is, they are taught how to critically examine Scripture with the intent of explaining what God is saying through a particular passage. They are also warned against the dangers of exegeting Scripture or reading into Scripture what we want it to say rather than listening to what it is trying to say. I want to explore the possibility that the Word of God is expressed in the life of the church. I am suggesting that the Body of Christ may be more than a metaphor. What if we took seriously that in some mysterious way the word of God continues to be expressed in the Body of Christ.
If we are to hear the Word of God as it is revealed in the life of the church in our time, we must also learn to exegete the Body of Christ. This is not a simple task. We must be careful not to become literalists in the process and succumb to the sin of idolatry. We must also be cautious about reading into the life of the church what we want it to say. Our task is to critically examine and seek to hear what God is saying through the Christ made flesh in the body we call the church. We must seek to listen to the truth as it is encased in the concrete reality of the Body.
How do you exegete a congregation? You cannot just take an action of a congregation and say that that reflects the Word of God. It is clear that congregations do some very sinful things. Like Jesus’ first disciples, we misunderstand, disobey and are just simply rebellious. At the same time, if we believe that the church is the Body of Christ, and therefore in some unique way embodies or incarnates the Word of God, then how do we hear that Word of God?
If you simply assume that the church is just an organization in which individuals decide what is inspiring and what is not, then you return Christianity to an individualistic religion with everyone being their own judge. What we are looking for is some combination of reading the patterns in a congregation and measuring them by the canon of Scripture so that we might discern how to listen to God express the Word in the congregation? We need to think of the history of a congregation as a parable which God has spoken to the world. Like Jesus’ parables, the characters and the action are easily identifiable as the ordinary lives of people, but like in many of Jesus’ parables, there is often a surprising twist in the congregational life through which the Word is revealed.
