Comments on: Reading the Bible as Literature (1)

By: Heidi

Heidi — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 23:01:16 +0000

Thank you for more to think about, Arjen. Just to reply here on point 5 —

Surely the narratives in Scripture do ascribe human activity/strategy/emotion to God? So though He sees all and fills heaven and earth (Jer. 23:24), He ‘came down’ to look at the tower of Babel — & in the same passage, though humans are utterly dependent creatures who can do nothing without His upholding (Isa. 51:12), He strategizes as if afraid of the joint power of creatures (‘nothing will be impossible to them’). Samuel speaks earlier without a narrative note that he has heard from the Lord (1 Samuel 7:3), yet we are not in doubt that he is speaking truth. It seems quite likely that as a prophet, in the vein of Isaiah, Jeremiah, above etc., he is speaking ‘high theology’ of God? — using the kind of literal negations that high theology often has to use (not a man that he should regret). Whereas the narrator would seem to be using the conventions used as early at least as the story of Babel to describe God’s interaction in history in human terms — using ‘regret’ in that sense. It makes sense to me that Samuel stands in a tradition with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others in affirming an utterly transcendent and non-creaturely reality of God — while at the same time we are supposed to see God interacting in our history. We’re supposed to be holding these realities in balance, not letting one cancel out the other?
When I did a word search for τόπος/tópos in the writings of Luke, the usage seemed rooted in literal space except for a speech of Paul’s in Acts (25:16) where it’s used more metaphorically. So Luke uses this word in reporting dialogue quite differently than usage in his own narrative.

By: Arjen Vreugdenhil

Arjen Vreugdenhil — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 02:08:36 +0000

In reply to Heidi (Ruben’s wife).

Heidi,

Thank you for your thoughtful observations. The theory of “Bible as literature” is certainly no exact science, and I love to see how different people observe different aspects.

1. Yes, Lewis nuances his disparaging assessment later on. Still, I found his statement useful as representative for those who are only negative about a “literary” approach. As someone who appreciates both the literary character of Scripture and C.S. Lewis, I was shocked when I first read it–and glad that he showed to have more nuance…

2. Intriguing thoughts about the John and his sevens… It is certainly a good approach to compare works by the same author. (Although the equation of John the Evangelist and John of Patmos is not entirely straightforward, and the books have a very different style.)
John 1 definitely gives occasion to compare more in-depth with Gen. 1 and following. The association of the Cana wedding with Adam’s wedding is fascinating. Add to this the fig tree scene in comparison to the garden; and John 1:51 compares Jesus to the Bethel “ladder”, which may also be connected to Eden as the primordial worship center.
I am skeptical about the association of the “days” in John 1 with the “days” in Gen 1. John does not use the word ἡμερα ‘hemera’, which is found in all ancient Greek versions of Gen 1, but a very different word ἐπαυριον ‘epaurion’ = “the next day”.

3. Your suggestion that we may have lost a transcendental outlook on eternal life is profound. In general I like to emphasize that the New Earth will be truly physical, more so than our current earth–because I find people talking about “going to heaven” in a rather abstract way. At the same time, I think that we easily think to low of the glory and the qualitative otherness of the world to come. We can mine the Bible for a deeper understanding and appreciation of it.
Yet I am not sure that this connects to a loss of allegorical reading of the Bible. Perhaps we use the word “allegory” in a slightly different sense. For example, a passage like Isaiah 35:1 does not describe a literal blossoming desert, that much is clear; but it is not purely symbolical, either. I would characterize it as “typico-symbolical”, where the image of a flourishing landscape points us to a higher, yet very real physical land, which is blossoming in a way “no eye has seen, no ear has heard”, yet not unlike the blossoming of earthly plants.
I would warn against “allegory” in the sense of more or less arbitrary symbolism, or of connecting physical descriptions to entirely spiritual concepts. The church rejected this approach already in the 4th century, and has continued doing so, with good reason.

4. Yes, a beautiful contrast between the end of Judges and the beginning of Ruth. This is undoubtedly deliberate. Ruth begins with “in the day of the Judges”, and ends with the announcement that there is a king!

5. The statements about God having (no) regret in 1 Sam 15 continue to be difficult! You are right, we must account for the different “forms” within a book, and that affects the semantic fields of words, especially in matters such as referrential/metaphorical. E.g. proverbs and prophecies use figurative language, hyperbole, etc. much more than narrative. Another example is the parable, where the introductory statement “There was a man who …” does not actually say that there actually was such a man.
However, I find it hard to fathom that the narrative statement in 1 Sam 15:35 (“the LORD regretted”) is meant more anthropopathically than in Samuel’s words. If anything, Biblical narrative is a form marked for historicity and factuality. (This is essential the conservative Christian argument against mythological interpretations of Gen 2-11 etc.) Therefore I think that the burden of proof is on those who deny that God actually regretted that he made Saul king: what elements in the text warrant such a deviation from the usual narrative function?
I am not quite sure what you are saying about “room” in Luke’s reporting of Paul’s speech. Could you give more detailed examples?

Those are my two cents. Thanks for your comment and I am looking forward to further discussion!

By: Heidi (Ruben's wife)

Heidi (Ruben's wife) — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 23:14:59 +0000

Arjen, I read all five parts and found a lot of wonderful things to go on thinking about — and made some notes.
1. I know his views on the OT were not sound but wondered if Lewis could be more charitably read as saying what you essentially say in pt. 3: that scripture has to be approached primarily on the basis of its unique assertions — only then will it make sense to analyze it literarily, as a unique kind of literature. Lewis was convinced of the truth of the gospels as a literary critic because their literary quality not that of myth but of history.
2. John uses a cycle of sevens in Revelation to convey a powerful vision of history. So a pattern with numbers would not be as surprising from him in a gospel as it might be from some other author. I can’t help observing that the first chapter of John, which echoes the creation narrative, also speaks of day/day/day — if you count up til you have to lose count you have a week, and then this miracle with a wedding and a ‘woman’ in which Christ is the central male. It suggests perhaps that if there is pattern of sevens here, it is about new creation? This would also be in line with John’s vision of history in Revelation.
3. As you note, the literary approach seems hindered in interpreting important considerations wherever a critic is anchored to smaller frameworks than God’s. So for instance one could interpret Biblical histories as primarily political polemic if the one can’t see past politics in interpreting one’s own time. I can’t help wondering about this in connection with our age’s devaluation of allegory — even as we’ve become better at other kinds of interpretation. Most of our children now live to adulthood and this was not the case even in Puritan times: we also now expect eternity to be an extension of a our busily temporal life in many ways, where previous ages were thinking of something quite other than our experience of time, a transcendently beatific vision. I don’t think everything is allegory, but we may have lost a framework to spot or interpret what is allegorical through dimmed vision of ulterior reality — vision that would have been sharper to those reading in more difficult earthly conditions. Just a hesitant thought.
4. Judges concludes with a lot of nameless women suffering terribly through the failure of men (two significantly from Bethlehem of Judah). Ruth provides a contrast — it starts off with the same failure of a man from Bethlehem and the ruined lives of women: but we know these women’s names. And there is another man in the story from Bethlehem, a redeemer. That it culminates in the lineage of David is just beautiful (also a contrast, though what implications are to be drawn are a bit beyond me, with Judges’ lack of a king).
5. I wonder if example 2, part 5 may be resolved by the literary device of anthropopathism and the difference between dialogue and narrative. Samuel is not *speaking* anthropopathically, but that does not mean the narrative will not use the same language so. Authors do use the same language differently when reporting and narrating (so Luke only seems to use the word translated ‘room’ in a non-literal fashion when he’s reporting a speech of Paul, I discovered in a word search the other day — which makes perfect sense.)