Psalms Part 1: Dissonance

In a recent post, I talked about struggling with the concept of ‘devotional reading’. During this process, I turned to the Psalms in hope of something that I would be able to be read in a simple way. I was looking for something pure and eternal, something that I could read without question or doubt, something that was simply true. Unfortunately this wasn’t how reading the Psalms turned out for me at that time.

Here is an adaptation of some personal reflections that I wrote during this process:

13th Oct 2021

Part of my early experience of Christian culture involved the notion that doubt is bad and faith is good. This idea, paired with a high view of scripture and a high view of tradition (perhaps unwittingly for the latter), has meant that people I’ve known have been dissuaded from pursuing theological questions and encouraged towards blind belief. An example of this is my brother being encouraged to blindly accept the doctrine of hell as eternal torment, despite what qualms he may have had with it. Dissonance between his understanding of justice and this particular doctrine of hell raised questions for him, but this was considered to be opposed to faith.

In contrast with this early experience of Christian culture, I recently shared my basic understanding of constructivism with someone (the idea that we are most able to learn when we are pursuing questions), and situated it within a developmental framework - in our early years we have a fairly simple worldview, and as we mature we realise its insufficiency and become open to exploring more complex approaches.

Right now, I can identify with the experience of constructivism. While I was formerly able to read scripture with a simple hermeneutic,¹ I am increasingly unable to do so. For me, this has been very disruptive… It seems that no matter where I turn, I’m constantly confronted by questions and problems — the way I used to approach scripture isn’t working for me anymore… It’s as though I need a new (likely more complex) way of understanding scripture? In the Christian cultures that I experienced early in life, this process would be frowned upon. But perhaps it would actually open up new opportunities for me to know God differently and to engage with him in a new way?

Psalm 8 and Dissonance

One passage that I was grappling with at the time was Psalm 8

“What is man that You take thought of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than God, And You crown him with glory and majesty! You make him to rule over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, All sheep and oxen, And also the beasts of the field, The birds of the heavens and the fish of the seas, Whatever passes through the paths of the seas…” (Psalm 8:4-8)

Psalm 8 looks back to creation, where Adam and Eve were made in the image of God and given dominion over all the animals and fish and birds. Yet somehow, in the New Testament this Psalm is understood in a messianic way.

I didn’t get it. What about this Psalm was messianic?

After a little reading, I discovered that at the time of Jesus, people were really feeling the tension between this Psalm’s celebration of God giving humankind dominion over the Earth, and their lived experience of God’s people being dominated by foreign peoples. For people in Jesus’ time, there was a real dissonance between what they read in the Psalm, and what they experienced on the ground. As it turns out, it was this dissonance that gave an opening for a messianic figure. They looked to the messiah to restore rule over God’s creation to God’s people Israel, rather than foreigners.

The idea that reading Psalm 8 in a messianic way could have been the result of scripture failing to line up with people’s lived experience really struck me. If this approach was legitimate for the authors of the New Testament, could it be legitimate for people today too? What sorts of opportunities to engage with God might open up for us if we made room for this sort of dissonance? (i.e. the dissonance between our understanding of scripture and our lived experience).

Dialogue with God

At the time, I shared my question about dissonance with my wife Melissa. One possibility that she brought up was engaging in dialogue with God about these differences. For example, “Lord, you say I’m loved, but right now I don’t feel loved.” or “Father, scripture says that you created the Earth in seven days, but science says the earth formed over millions of years. What am I supposed to do with this?”

As I reflected on Melissa’s idea, I realised that I had come across this approach before in the book of Job. Job was considered righteous for complaining to God that he was suffering even though he’d done nothing wrong. In contrast, Job’s friends were condemned for giving Job the pat answers of the time - ‘You wouldn’t be suffering like this if you hadn’t done something wrong. Admit it, you’ve sinned big time!’ They wrote off Job’s experience on the basis that it didn’t match their pre-formed beliefs. I feel like, in my experience, many Christians can be more like Job’s friends and less like Job…

Perhaps if I’m able to convince myself that it’s okay to have difficulty with parts of scripture it could provide an opening for me to sincerely engage in dialogue with God, rather than just praying cookie cutter prayers because ‘I should’? Perhaps if I’m able to live with ambiguity and complexity, God might have new things to teach me that I wouldn’t have been able to accept had I clung to my simpler understanding of scripture? Perhaps if I’m able to acknowledge the dissonance in my own experience, I’ll be more able to engage with others whose worldviews don’t match my own?

Footnotes

1. A ‘hermeneutic’ is a way of interpreting or understanding scripture.