This invitation to submit an article for The Living Pulpit has been an intriguing one for which to prepare. Although when I hear about the imminent demise of the so-called mainline church, I’m reminded of the quip attributed to Mark Twain that “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” I appreciate the opportunity to think about how the Bible functions in the churches my students serve and where my family and I worship. I want to begin with a story from one of my classes that suggests some ways that critical biblical scholarship contributes to the renewal of life in the historic Protestant churches in North America. Then I want to share a resource that has sparked lively interest in many of those churches during the past four years.

Mark 16:1-8

We were talking about Mark 16 in my exegesis class this spring, and my immediate purpose was to introduce students to the art and science of text-criticism. The so-called “Shorter Ending of Mark” that appears after 16:8 arose sometime in the fourth century. The “Longer Ending,” vv. 9-20, probably from the late second century (Justin and Ireneus both refer to it), is also a scribal addition to Mark’s Gospel. For this class session, the students had read Bruce M. Metzger’s treatment of the manuscript evidence in his Textual Commentary (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994) and Donald H. Juel’s marvelous essay on 16:1-8 about what it means to experience that paragraph as the rightful if troubling ending of the narrative (“A Disquieting Silence: The Matter of the Ending,” 107-121 in A Master of Surprise: Mark Interpreted (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1994).

First we looked at the last page of Mark in Codex Sinaiticus on line, with its striking euangelion kata markon after v. 8 (www.codexsinaiticus.org), and the students were impressed that they could actually read some of it. Then we talked about how we ought to understand that strange ending. Although Metzger says we should think of it as an accident—the real ending was lost, he says—Juel makes a compelling case for its being quite deliberate. Jesus has, after all, repeatedly predicted that he will die and be raised (8:31; 9:9, 31; 10:33-34) and that his disciples will see him in Galilee (14:28; 16:7). And Mark’s book is evidence that the women did eventually speak and that they were heard. Mark’s Christian readers—and they must be Christians, for the book would be incomprehensible to outsiders; it would never work as a missionary tract—know not only that he has been raised but also that he has gone before them into Galilee and across the Roman Empire and even to the shores of the New World where the structures and cultural power of Christendom are now crumbling, once booming congregations are shrinking, and seminarians are likely to serve churches vastly different from the ones they grew up in.

The conversation was particularly thoughtful that night as the class reflected on how difficult it is to come to the end of Mark’s story, a story that calls itself, “the good news of Jesus Christ” (1:1), only to have the women flee from the tomb in fearful silence after hearing the young man tell them Jesus has been raised. It is disappointing to hear that Mary, Mary, and Salome fail to believe just as the Twelve have failed throughout Mark’s book. They come, after all, to anoint a corpse, not to encounter the risen Lord. The scribal additions to Mark combine parts of Matthew and Luke who also found Mark’s ending so unsatisfying that they rewrote it. Look at how Matthew alters Mark’s last sentence: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8) becomes “they left quickly with fear and great joy” (Matt. 28:8). Juel says, “The history of the Markan ending in manuscript and commentary betrays an unwillingness or inability to take the disappointment seriously” (p. 112). And that, he says, is a theological failure. The desire to wrap up loose ends and create a happy ending betrays a human need to be in control. Hendrikus Boers observes, “The endings of Matthew and Luke, compared with Mark, have the effect of placing the events recorded…in the past. The effect of Mark’s abrupt ending is that it leaves everything hanging, as if one is still involved in the events” (“Reflections on the Gospel of Mark: A Structural Investigation,” 255-267 in Kent H. Richards, ed., SBL Seminar Papers [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987]). That is Juel’s point—Mark’s story of the “good news of Jesus Christ” will not allow us to be passive spectators. We are caught up into the work of God who has ripped open the heavens (1:11), ripped up the temple curtain (15:38), and is out in the world as never before.

What a remarkable gospel word to hear when there is so very much to be afraid of, even now. The ending of Mark’s Gospel drives us back to its beginning because the story is still going on. Jesus makes other predictions in Mark about that continuing story. In 13:9-13, he says,

North American Protestants do not face the hostility and persecution Mark’s first listeners faced. Contemporary challenges are different. The good news, though, is the same now as then: that this story is not ours but God’s and God can be trusted to bring it to completion. In times of profound change and frightening trends—particularly in such times—the church is ironically set free from its need to control and manage its institutional life and thrust into the world to meet Jesus who is out there on the loose. The so-called mainline church today is becoming marginalized and the margins of society are precisely where Christians belong because that is where Jesus is. Justo González asks, “Is it legitimate for a church to call itself at the same time both ‘mainline’ and ‘Christian’?” (Santa Biblia: The Bible Through Hispanic Eyes [Nashville: Abingdon, 1996], 55). While Christendom accomplished a great deal that seems to have been of God, it separated the church from its native habitat on the margins, and for that reason we can be thankful for the end of Christendom. What is emerging from it we cannot yet see; from my limited perspective, though, it is more likely to be authentically Christian if it is not marked by institutional self-preservation.

Toward the end of that classroom discussion, one man said, “This is really exciting, but I cannot talk about this in my church because the Bible my people read has Mark ending at 16:20, not 16:8.” I am familiar with churches like that, although I have never been a member of one. I am from West Virginia, and I grew up surrounded by Pentecostal Christians for whom the “Longer Ending of Mark” contains some important marching orders. Over Memorial Day weekend just this year, a Pentecostal preacher from near Bluefield, West Virginia, died after the serpent he handled during worship bit him. Although my student’s church does not go in for serpent-handling or poison-drinking as measures of Christian faith, and it is in the Reformed rather than the Pentecostal tradition, it does have a supremely high view of scripture and a particular fondness for the King James translation of the Bible, just as that Appalachian Pentecostal minister who died of snake bite had. This student is an elder in his fifties, a seasoned and respected church leader who is afraid about the fragile dynamics in his congregation, the changes he sees in the Presbyterian Church of which it is a part, and its dwindling resources for mission. The discussion turned to ways Mark’s surprising ending might in fact address those fears and empower ministry in new ways that are every bit as much shaped by the Bible as the old ways that no longer work.

Feasting on the Word

I have been part of a project that persuades me this is true of much more than the ending of Mark’s Gospel. Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008-2011) is a joint endeavor of Columbia Theological Seminary, the denominational school I serve, and Westminster John Knox Press, a denominational publisher. David Bartlett (an American Baptist minister and New Testament professor) and Barbara Brown Taylor (an Episcopal priest and college professor) gathered an editorial board of twelve of us, and we invited some 1200 people to write serious, thoughtful, critical essays on every single biblical text that occurs in the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary. For each biblical passage, including the Psalms, we solicited thousand-word essays from four people, each from a different perspective: exegetical, theological, pastoral, and homiletical. The theological perspective asked, how does this passage reflect the Christian tradition or interact with it? The pastoral essay thought about how the text might address individual and congregational life and work. The exegetical writer explored the literary contours of the passage and highlighted it’s significant historical and linguistic features. The homiletical perspective addressed various ways a preacher might move from text to sermon. Our contributors were Catholic and Protestant academics and clergy, largely from the historic denominations, since that is who we were and those were the people we knew and since those are the churches that use the Lectionary, but also from other traditions as we were able to secure people interested in our project. We collected a total of 7,920 essays on 1,980 texts and published them in twelve volumes, four each for the three years of the lectionary cycle.

People who purchased Feasting on the Word were largely from across the mainline—heavily Presbyterian and Methodist, but significant numbers of Lutherans and Episcopalians as well, and not a few Roman Catholics. This year Westminster John Knox introduced a Christian education curriculum based on Feasting on the Word for churches that seek to tie study of scripture more closely to worship. Feasting on the Word has also given birth to several companion projects: that Christian education curriculum for all ages, essays for people who prepare children’s sermons (written by David and Carol Bartlett), daily devotionals put together by Kathleen Long Bostrom and Elizabeth F. Caldwell, the Feasting on the Word Worship Companion edited by Kimberly Bracken Long, and now Feasting on the Gospels (edited by Cynthia A. Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, all available at www.feastingontheword.net/). Feasting on the Gospels is a multi-volume series that will comment on the whole of all four Gospels, including all the passages left out of the Lectionary (and even including textual variants like Mark 16:9-20!), from the same four perspectives we used in Feasting on the Word: pastoral, theological, exegetical, and homiletical. We are well into work on the two volumes for Matthew and the contributions look to be just as good as those we received for Feasting on the Word. Indeed, many of the same authors are writing for us.

A remarkable group of people agreed to share this work with us because they believed it was worthwhile. No one got paid what their work was worth, but many asked us to invite them again because they found it gratifying. In my experience, not enough ministers have opportunities to write seriously about the Bible and not enough scholars write for the church. We are changing that. The response we have received suggests that we are meeting real needs. Sometimes it is a preacher who gets stuck halfway through the week working on a sermon that is going nowhere and a Feasting essay opens up a text to her in a new and refreshing way. Sometimes it is a minister who reads in search of help for a sermon and finds instead that his own devotional reading of the text has been moved. Sometimes it is an academic who thanks us for putting her back in touch with one of the reasons she became a scholar in the first place.

Feasting is a sign, I think, of how the Bible functions in the mainline church today. Careful, critical, faithful engagement with scripture in service to the church’s life and mission is valued. Rather than standing in contrast to so-called “Bible-believing churches,” Methodist, Episcopal, American Baptist, Presbyterian, Disciples, and Lutheran congregations are looking hard at the challenges they face and listening even harder to the Bible to figure out how they ought to respond. It seems to me that the mainline church, rather than dying, is instead experiencing a profound reformation. Reformation happens when the church listens to scripture.

The reformations of the sixteenth century could not have happened without the serious and sustained Bible study that stood at the center of the European university curriculum. So also, the reformations taking place among North American Christians today are being shaped by students of scripture who come from vastly different backgrounds than Luther’s and Calvin’s. When I joined the Society of Biblical Literature in 1977, it was overwhelmingly an organization of men whose ancestors were from Northern Europe. There were hardly any people who looked like Phyllis Trible and even fewer who looked like Delores Williams or Ada María Isasi-Díaz or Sze-Kar Wan. In twenty-five years I have witnessed a sea change in the SBL as well as in my own Presbyterian Church (USA) as people formerly at the margins of both church and academy have begun to read the Bible, have heard in it God’s call to reformation and renewal, and have as a consequence changed the ways men with Northern European ancestors read the Bible.

The women at Jesus’ tomb said nothing to anyone because they were afraid. My student was afraid to talk about Mark 16:1-8 as the end of the book with his congregation. But God is in charge of this story; we aren’t. The women’s Easter message is preached, the Spirit has empowered witness to the gospel, in times of comfort and complacency as well as persecution and suffering, and Jesus is still out on the loose in the world he loves and for which he died. Although there is no question the historic Protestant churches in this country are experiencing tremendous changes, the reformation God is working will result not in death but in life. A recent popular book by Phyllis Tickle argues that this reformation—she calls it an emergence—will be marked by our discarding the Reformed principle of sola scriptura because it has become outdated and unnecessarily divisive (The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008]). I think she is dead wrong, both in her assessment of the current situation and in her prescriptions for addressing it, because what is at stake in our current struggles is not the authority of the Bible but its interpretation. There is no question North American Christians are divided about how we ought to interpret scripture; we are nevertheless united by a common commitment to do so. The Bible is at the very center of this reformation just as it was five hundred years ago.

About the author

Elizabeth Johnson wrote one article for this publication.

E. Elizabeth Johnson is the J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. She is the author of “Paul’s Reliance on Scripture in 1 Thessalonians,” The Women’s Bible Commentary: 2/e and “God’s Covenant Faithfulness to Israel,” in Reading the Letter to the Romans. She is co-general editor of Feasting on the Gospels, and a member of the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta (PCUSA).

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