Making Sense of the Bible

Helen-Ann Hartley

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281064052
• eBook ISBN: 9780281066605
• Edition: 1
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

One of a series of 6 small books dealing in a short and accessible way with the key concerns for Christians. Again and again, we hear that such-and-such an opinion is not 'biblical', implying that the Bible speaks with a unified voice on any matter. With humour and examples drawn from art and life, Helen-Ann Hartley argues that our reading of this varied collection of writings has to be generous, not exclusive. To appreciate fully the Bible's richness and diversity, we have to wrestle critically and creatively with themes that attract us and repel us. Not only should we draw meaning from the Bible, we must let our lives contribute meaning to the stories it tells, engaging in conversation with those stories and allowing them to urge us into being -- to think, speak and act. Ultimately, to make sense of the Bible, we need to make sense of who we are in relationship to God.

1

Stories

‘It’s all about the story’

(advertisement on the side of a bus for a television company)

On Saturday 20 February 2010, the public reading of the whole Bible in Durham Cathedral came to an end. Pat Francis, the co-ordinator of the ‘Big Read’, said:

On this final day of the Read we heard read these words from 1 Timothy 4.13– ‘pay attention to the public reading of Scripture.’ This has been fulfilled by 506 readers from an ecumenical list of denominations . . . and represents 106 individual readers, 30 teams, and 7 schools. 928 people spent time listening during the Read, and the children from the 7 schools, along with all who shared in this event, will have brought back to family, friends, neighbours and work colleagues their scripts and the news of what they had read, of what they had heard. The proclaiming of Scripture grows beyond the Cathedral.¹

Stories, or more particularly the proclamation of stories, are a vital part of many cultures in our world, but perhaps less so in many Western contexts. Stories can have immense power, and the ability for our imagination to be captured by ‘a good yarn’ is a very real one. The reappearance of the Doctor Who franchise on UK television (and exported to other countries) brought back the adventures of this most famous of time travellers to the highly valued prime-time Saturday evening family viewing slot. The season finale of series three, ‘The Last of the Time Lords’, depicted the Doctor’s assistant, Martha Jones, travelling across Earth for a year. For most of the episode we were led to believe that she was collecting parts for a particular weapon that would destroy the arch-enemy known as The Master. As the episode reached a critical point, Martha Jones revealed that she was not travelling on Earth to locate parts for a gun, but instead to tell people stories about the Doctor so that at a particular moment everyone would think about the Doctor, and the collective energy of their thoughts would in fact overcome The Master. It was the power of stories rather than technology that won the day. When this episode was first broadcast, on 30 June 2007, it produced a viewing figure of 8.61 million.² While the Doctor Who franchise undoubtedly has a life of its own, a large part of the story of its success lies in the skill of the writers who put the story together.

Aside from the world of film and television, the telling of stories can play an important role in shaping and affirming national identity. Following any major event or disaster, it is commonplace for people to want to share the story of where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. The telling of stories can also have a redemptive quality, as the process in South Africa following the end of apartheid, known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has demonstrated, along with other similar processes of restorative justice.

When it comes to the Bible, encountering its variety of stories is rather like making your way through an art gallery. Which route do you take? An orderly one (as suggested by the official guide book), or do you go with your own sense of direction, heading straight for the Mona Lisa bypassing countless other paintings? The point of encounter, of looking at stories, is the point at which we start, before the process of interpretation begins (although it is sometimes hard to separate the two). In his article ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture’, Rowan Williams advocates an approach to reading the stories of the Bible in a ‘literal sense’. By ‘literal’ he means reading with attention and patience, story by story, allowing for plurality of genres, for occasions of conflict where texts appear to work against each other, and moments when the text just doesn’t seem to make sense. The word ‘literal’ does not equate in meaning with more fundamentalist readings which ultimately shrink the meaning of the texts.³ Much like the ‘Big Read’ mentioned above, perhaps we need to spend more time simply reading the texts as stories, rather than taking elements from different stories in order to work out where an overall sense of ‘unity’ lies. This latter approach is more naturally predisposed to be agenda-driven (whether consciously or not), stemming from a desire to uphold one version of events over all others.⁴ This attention to ‘taking time’ in story-by-story reading is unsettling to a Western culture dominated by speed.⁵

Individual story-units in the Bible are sometimes called ‘pericopes’, a word that is not understood by modern word-processing programs, with spell-checkers set to change ‘pericope’ to ‘periscope’. Yet there may well be meaning to this, for when read carefully stories alert us to deeper ‘movements or rhythms’ within a text, meanings that are located above and beyond where the boundaries of the text appear to lie.⁶ Sometimes we need to look up and around in order to comprehend what it is we are looking at (as my encounter with the art installation referred to in the Introduction taught me).⁷ A story-driven reading isn’t as naive as it might sound, and it certainly allows for a more honest approach that invites contributions from all sides of the interpretative spectrum.⁸ Moreover, it permits the boundaries of meaning to change depending on whether we read a story on its own, or within a particular book, or indeed within a particular section of the Bible. It does not advocate the elevation of one interpretation over another, but rather gives permission for a great variety of readings – of even just one story (pericope) – to be in conversation with one another. In this way, reading the Bible creates a proper sense of unity that does not come from everyone thinking the same thing,

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A story-driven reading gives permission for a great variety of readings . . . to be in conversation with one another

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but from the obligation to bear with one another, to testify to the truth as we have received it, and to continue to show forbearance and patience in the shared hope that when all things are revealed, the Revealer will also display the manner in which our diverse interpretations form a comprehensive concord in ways that now elude our comprehension.⁹

But what is it exactly that we are reading? A colleague of mine once began a session on how Anglicans read the Bible by asking the assembled group what title they might give to the Bible. At first, the reaction was, ‘It’s already got a title: The Bible,’ but following an initial sense of puzzlement, the group pondered this question and offered a variety of suggestions:

The Word is out

God’s story

The meaning of everything

42 (from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number that apparently answers everything that can be asked in life about life)

God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit

The story of salvation

People get it wrong, God puts it right

The Good Book

It was, as it turned out, a considerably more difficult exercise than it first appeared. It brought about a realization that ‘the Bible’ is indeed a whole series of stories. Brought together as ‘canon’ they stand alone, each constituent part offering an angle on what might best be described as a ‘God-shaped’ story. But the question remains, ‘What is it that we are reading?’ The saying goes that every picture tells a story, but pictures are not always titled. To make matters more confusing, sometimes the title a painting is given is simply Untitled. Placed next to such a painting by the artist Richard Serra the helpful comment to the pondering viewer reads:

Perhaps art is a visual experience. Rather than offering external explanations, they [the artist] want us to engage with what is physically there – the contrasts of dark and light, relations between shapes and the impressions of harmony or tensions that result . . . visual art is special because it says something that is difficult to capture in words, and that includes words on a wall label.¹⁰

This provides a helpful insight into what a ‘literal’ approach to reading the Bible might involve. An analogous model was in fact proposed by Brooke Foss Westcott in the late nineteenth century. Westcott held that the details of the biblical narratives mattered intensely. Although it was important to view the texts as a whole, from a distance, there was ultimately more to be gained from paying close attention to detail. To put it succinctly:

Interpretation for the believer is thus a shuttling between the closest possible reading of the text, with all the resources available, and the repeated attempt to find words to articulate the complex unity that is being uncovered.¹¹

I once led a Bible study with a group of women on the Magnificat, which is found in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel. Surprisingly, it was the verse immediately after the words of the Magnificat that attracted the most discussion. In 1.56 we read: ‘And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.’ A brief glance at academic commentaries on Luke’s Gospel reveals that this sentence does not attract much comment, if any, yet it was this verse that invited further exploration precisely because it involved imaginative reflection upon events ‘off the page’. We will look more at the importance of imaginative reflection later on in this book, but it makes the important point here that time spent with stories can often enable specific details to be noticed that we might otherwise pass over.

Genre

The Bible, as we have already asserted, is a collection of books, within which we find collections of stories. The use of the word ‘book’, however, needs some qualification at this point, since at the time of composition there were only scrolls, and copies of scrolls. Moreover, each ‘book’ was likely produced by multiple authors, often in different locations, over different periods of time and crucially, writing in the languages of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, using different genres.¹² The book of Revelation, for example, can only be fully understood if we take into account its apocalyptic genre. This helps us understand the fantastical imagery in this book, which makes little sense to us, but makes every sense with regard to the genre that provides the framework through which we encounter this text. Attention to the variety of genres is also helpful because not every pericope in the Bible may neatly be defined as a ‘story’, at least in our own understandings of what stories are; it depends on the genre of what we are reading. So we use ‘story’ lightly in the sense that each narrative unit is ultimately telling us something about the story of God (this is how we choose to view it from the perspective of faith). This is useful to bear in mind when we encounter what to all intents and purposes looks like a book (pages of writing between two covers). At the same time, although we encounter the Bible first and foremost as a work of literature, the stories themselves emerged from oral tradition and were rooted in a belief in God who created the world, sustained it and redeemed it through Jesus Christ. So we are dealing with multiple layers: the Bible is a pluralistic text, and the translations that we have are themselves interpretations. This should give us some encouragement when we try to make sense of the Bible as a whole; it reminds us of the need for patience when it comes to this process of searching for meaning, and awareness that language is often a barrier to that meaning.

Why those stories?

What are the stories that are contained in the Bible, and why those stories and not others? Both these questions can, on one level, be answered quite simply: the ‘what’ and ‘why’ are because of a relationship, or rather, many relationships. There is not a single story in the Bible that does not have its origin in a relationship: with God, with other people, or with communities. Paul’s letter to Philemon is a good example of this. Being such a short letter, it is easy to understand why it might not have made it into the New Testament canon. But the importance and authority of its author Paul secured its place. The relationship that Paul had with his communities made them value his writings highly. Part of the dynamics of that relationship, as the stories themselves reveal, are the many ways in which people respond. Of course, when it comes to the letters of the New Testament, we don’t have direct access to the response of the communities to which the letters were sent, and this is why the ‘stories’ of Paul’s letters need to be interpreted dramatically, taking into account their genre as letters.¹³ One almost has to imagine a conversation happening; these are not ‘flat’ documents. This sense of conversation (direct and indirect) is the meaning and importance of the covenantal theme that is sustained throughout the Bible, and is more of an active state of being rather than a story told and that alone. The covenantal theme works beyond the boundaries of the texts, as the stories are received, valued and discerned in communities, in multiple contexts and places. In this way, the insight of N. T. Wright may be helpful here: that the Bible is like a five-act Shakespearean play. The fifth act remains unwritten and it is up to ‘us’ to improvise its contents while remaining ‘in character’.¹⁴ Yet even with this a note of caution should be registered over who determines the meaning of ‘character’ and whether more than one expressio...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Stories
• 2. Contexts
• 3. Encounters
• 4. Conversations
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further reading