Warming the Word

Hermeneutics and Stages of Change

I recently shared how I attempted to use Blaise Pascal’s strategy to “warm, not instruct” in writing The Book of Love.

That idea of “warming” to a reading of Scripture is something I describe in The Book of Love in reference to a related idea described by William James:

The philosopher William James once described how ideas and beliefs can feel either hot or cold to us, as either alive or dead. For example, what do you think about ghosts? Depending upon how you see the world, the reality of ghosts will feel to you as hot and alive, as a real possibility, or cold and dead, as totally unbelievable and impossible. Why the reality of ghosts feels hot or cold to you, alive or dead, speaks to your deeply held assumptions about the nature of reality. Those background assumptions, often unconscious and unspoken, shape how you read and interpret the world.

The same goes for how you read the Bible. Some readings of the Bible feel hot or cold to you, either alive or dead. Some readings of Scripture you find obviously wrong and illegitimate. Totally un-biblical. For you, these are cold and dead readings. Other readings are hot and alive, readings you find compelling and plainly true. These readings you deem biblical.

And at the end of that chapter I return to the image:

When we get to the end of our journey together, what I will have shared with you will feel either hot or cold, as either a live or dead option for you. We may have to agree to disagree about some things. But my hope is that reading the Bible as a book of love will grow warm with possibility and promise. I pray something comes to life for you.

This is one of the reasons I didn’t draw straight lines in the book from Biblical text to doctrinal conclusion or political belief. Draw those lines too quickly or directly and the reading comes across as cold and dead. You’ve jumped too far, hermeneutically speaking. You attempted instruction but neglected warming.

Another way to think about this approach is by applying stages of change theory to hermeneutics. If you want to change how a person reads the Bible, you cannot begin with argument and instruction. In stages of change theory, people in the pre-contemplation stage are not yet open to change because the alternative does not feel viable, meaningful, or even imaginable. Again, the reading feels cold and dead. And this is often where many of us begin with respect to unfamiliar interpretations of Scripture. We dismiss them instinctively, before serious consideration, because they do not fit our background assumptions about God, truth, holiness, justice, or love. Consequently, the first task of hermeneutics is not persuasion but warming. Before a person can contemplate a new reading of Scripture, that reading must become emotionally and imaginatively possible. The reading must begin to feel warm and alive. Only then can the person move out of the pre-contemplation stage of hermeneutics and into the contemplation stage, the stage where we begin to genuinely wrestle with the possibility that we have seen something partially, or perhaps even wrongly, and that the Spirit is inviting us into a deeper and truer vision of God.