I am looking forward to watching The Last Priests in Ireland, Ardal O’Hanlon’s new documentary coming out tomorrow evening.

In O’Hanlon’s interview yesterday with Brendan O’Connor, the two men discuss how women “of a certain vintage” sometimes tell them they would make good priests. As a comedian-actor and interviewer respectively, they both create cathartic spaces for their audiences. Reflection, transcendence, irony, and a fresh perspective on the world–all aspects of the human condition associated with religion–are all part of their job.

The two men reminisced about a period in the 1990’s when it seemed Irish Catholicism was going to have a renaissance, a “hippie moment for the church.” Almost wistfully, they described a brief period when more Catholics were reading the Bible for themselves rather than getting all their answers from the catechism.

I realised then that they view reading the Bible as an act of subversion against the stagnation of religious institutions, and suddenly I saw my own Protestant and Anabaptist heritage in a new light. For all the flippant iconoclasm of Protestant Christianity, there is one stroke of genius we stumbled upon and have largely maintained until today. Despite the nuclear fission that recently saw us exceeding the 40,000-denominations threshold, it still survives.

The Bible, we have insisted, is for all people.

The Bible is a public document.

Let me add in the same breath that there are many ways this has been abused. We cherry-pick verses to fit our pet beliefs. We find a translation that excuses us from following Jesus completely. As self-proclaimed mini popes, we dogmatise an obscure or novel interpretation and cause yet further division.

Had I been invited to O’Connor and O’Hanlon’s interview, I might have pointed out that I envy certain aspects of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. I love the lectionary, for instance, and I don’t know why many Protestants have abandoned it. (Thankfully, the Methodist church we attend still follows a condensed form of it.) By following the lectionary, Catholics are formed by the full range of the Bible, which in reality is not a book but a library. Each Sunday they get the Pentateuch, the prophets, the Gospels and the epistles.

The creation story in Genesis, when it is read in a liturgical setting, can be received in quiet reverence as an ancient defence of the inherent goodness of creation. In contrast, a Protestant pastor might tack scattered bits of the story onto his pre-packaged sermon about how dinosaurs existed 4000 years ago and how anyone who denies this is a reprobate.

Not to sound nauseatingly balanced and domesticated, but maybe the solution is to marry the best of both worlds, the formational nature of the Catholic approach to scripture and the free inquiry of Protestants.

On one hand, we could continue the Protestant tradition of valuing the insights of all believers, not just the popes and the bishops (not just the men, I almost said, but that sounds snarky). On the other hand, we could create spaces where we pause our questions and protestings and let scripture speak to us. In communion with millions of other members of Christ’s body around the world, we could take in long-form and uninterrupted readings from the lectionary.

Having more adequately digested scripture, we would then have more authority to question, to reflect, to interpret, and yes, where necessary, to subvert. To travail in birth again, as it says in Galatians, until Christ be fully formed in us.