How to read the Bible story fruitfully

Holy Week is built around multiple retellings of the passion story. As well as events in Church, round here that means listening to the whole of two Bach passions. To profit from this week’s activity, we need to hear the story in itself as for the first time, noticing fresh details, engaging our imaginations with the world around us and our personal circumstances, and listening for a sympathetc resonance between those realities.

We live in a world of powers and empires, of brands, logos and globalized world order. St Paul’s letter to the Colossians engages with the realities of empire, its principalities and powers, and reveals Christ above and beyond it all, yet also deep within us.

There’s a wonderful description of how the Church uses Scripture corporately for this purpose in a great, creative commentary on Colossians I have been reading recently:

In order to have vision we must have memory. Indeed forgetfulness or amnesia is precisely what strips us of vision — without the past there can be no future. So our contemporary improvisation must be informed and directed by both a profound indwelling of the biblical vision of life and a discerning attentiveness to the postbiblical scenes that have already been acted out in the history of the church.

There is a certain dynamic in this approach to Biblical authority that could be described as a dance between innovation and consistency. Our serious reading of Scripture must be characterized by fidelity to the thrust of the narrative and thus provide our life with a stability and consistency, a rootedness. At the same time, however, the Bible as an unfinished drama gives us freedom for historical innovation and thus a creative and imaginative flexibility in our historical responses. It is only by maintaining the essential relationship between stability and flexibility that we “may avoid the hazards” of both a rigid fossilization of our faith and “a deeper relativizing that gives up everything for a moment of contemporary relevance.”

As we read through the Biblical Story, it is clear that the Israelites themselves retold their stories with such fidelity and innovation. As the ancient Israelites encountered new situations, they remembered and interpreted their traditions in such a way that they engaged contemporary problems and concerns. Indeed without such dynamic interpretation, the texts and traditions contained within them were seen to be incomplete...

Stability and flexibility, fidelity and creativity, consistency and innovation — these are key if a narrative text is to have any current authority in our lives.

Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat
Colossians remixed — Subverting the Empire
pp 134-5

Reading the Bible 101

Before Darwin (1859), everyone took the whole Bible literally, yes? Yes and No. They read it in all sorts of interesting ways. From at least the time of John Cassian (c360-435), Christians read the Bible (1) literally, (2) allegorically, (3) morally and (4) anagogically. Nicholas of Lyra used to teach his students at the Sorbonne in the fourteenth century a ditty to help them remember this:

Littera gesta docet
Quid credas allegori,
moralis quid agas,
Quo tendas anagogia

which being translated means:

Literal teaches what happened,
Allegorical what you believe,
Moral what you should do,
Anagogical where you’re going

But they believed Genesis literally before Darwin, didn’t they? Here’s Origen, (185-254), On First Principles:

Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without sun, mooon and stars? And that first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who could be silly enough to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of good and evil by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to walk in the paradise in the cool of the day and Adam to hide hmself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual event...

Radical stuff. The idea that the “factual/ original” meaning of a text is its only real one dates back to Benjamin Jowett in 1859, the year the Origin of Soecies was published. People who lived before then were not fools. Wooden fundamentalism about the Bible was not the only option before Darwin.

In the same way as “original instruments” recordings are not, in fact, the only or even the best possible ways to get your Bach, we have to lay aside earnest Victorian literalism and come alive again to the riches of the Biblical texts as they are. Ancient wisdom integrated what you read and how you read it, what it meant to you and what you did about it, rather than trying to extract any single “meaning” from it using Victorian historical science.

We need to find a way of reading and rightly handling the scriptures that integrates Text, history, Canon, spirituality, and sets the poetry of it free. Perhaps the Victorian tyranny of “facts” has taken us as far as it can, and it’s time for another revolution by tradition that will set us free to read the Scriptures as they have been received, lived and interpreted over thousands of years, so as to own them, and live them ourselves with all their shades and levels of truth, and richness.

More Rudiments of Wisdom

At a time many feel “We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our grave,” here’s a poem to help, by Moshe Safdie, architect of the children’s memorial at Yad Vashem:

He who seeks truth shall find beauty

He who seeks beauty shall find vanity

He who seeks order shall find gratification,

He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed

He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings
shall find the joy of self-expression

He who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance

Arrogance is incompatible with nature,
Through nature,
the nature of the unverse
and the nature of man,
we shall seek truth,
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.

The Rudiments of Wisdom

I was at the toddler service at Buckingham Parish Church this Wednesday. Claire Wood was doing a wonderful storytelling job on the tale behind the famous icon you see everywhere (Left), explaining how Sarah really wanted a baby and couldn't seem to get one. She used this excellent Russian Doll (Right) for Sarah. And when the baby came, asked Claire, what kind of baby do you think it was? (boy? girl?) Quick as a flash young Eva replied, “One a lot less decorated than that one!”

Beware the Christmas Trolls

Journalists are key professionals in an information based democracy — They get blamed for all sorts of things, but good professional journalism is good for us all. Good journalists go out and report news. They also comment on it editorially. They have the same right to commentate as anyone else, and rather a stronger information base from which to do it than most of us. Lazy journalists, if any exist, know they can't just make up stories.

Or can they? You could do something like this. Send a round robin to all RAF officers asking, for example, "Is the space shuttle a technological miracle or an expensive white elephant? Yes, no, don't know". People who are silly enough to reply tick all sorts of boxes in response to ambiguous and loaded questions — in that lies your story. It enables you to splash an exclusive that 56% of RAF officers don't believe in aviation, or hate America. Whatever. You don't even have to leave the office, or deplete your stock of rentaquotes. Easy, Cheap, Fun... and Crap.

Serious research, of course, is carefully set up so that the results mean something. Shock Horror surveys initiated by lazy journalists at a time of year none of us wants to be out and about only prove the old saying — Research indicates that 98·6% of surveys are rubbish.

Friends, we are being Trolled.

Is this the Truth? Could things really turn around?

Stick with the possibilities of this — There's a twist in it!

Kudos to Eric Bramlett, Creative Arts monkey @ Community Christian Church of Chicago.