Nicholas Lash on Performing the Scriptures

This notion of ‘performing the Scriptures’ was highlighted in an influential essay by Nicholas Lash.[1] He begins from the rather obvious point that reading or interpretation of a text depends largely on the kind of text being used: ‘different kinds of text call for different kinds of reading’.[2] To read some texts – in particular, those texts which are ‘works of art’ – does require the assistance of experts; however, the role of experts in reading texts while indispensible, is subordinate. Their expert ‘reading’ is not the fundamental form of interpretation. Rather, ‘there are at least some texts that only begin to deliver their meaning in so far as they are ‘brought into play’ through interpretative performance’.[3]

Having used King Lear and a Beethoven score as examples, Lash now applies his insight to the New Testament, suggesting that ‘the fundamental form of the Christian interpretation of scripture is the life, activity and organization of the believing community’.[4] Christian practice can properly be described as ‘interpretative action’ – a performance of the texts, in other words. This performance, in its turn, is an enactment of the conviction that the best (‘best’ because most appropriate to the text in question) reading of these texts is as the story of Jesus, human beings and God. The performative interpretation of Scripture can also be called ‘Christian discipleship’. Lash allows that performances may differ over history, as circumstances change; but though the story may be told differently, it cannot be a different story if it is to be a performance of this text. The original meaning of the text gives an appropriate constraint to later performances of it.

This points to an important difference between Scripture and King Lear, which has to do with history. The New Testament self-conciously adheres to particular past events. Its original meaning was not merely that Jesus Christ was representative of certain fundamental human virtues, but that he was one man ‘in whom the mystery of divine action is seen to have been embodied and disclosed’.[5] So, for Lash, to suppose that we could render an authentic performance of the New Testament utterly disconnected from the historical would be to tell a different story from the one the New Testament itself tells. Lash goes on: ‘…for the practice of Christianity, the performacne of the biblical text, to be true…must not be not only ‘true to life’, but ‘true to his life’; and not only ‘true to his life’, but ‘true to God’.[6]


[1] Nicholas Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005).
[2] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 38.
[3] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 41.
[4] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 42.
[5] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 45.
[6] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 45.