Enjoying the Bible

Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures

Mullins, Matthew

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493421954
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Literatura y artes en el cristianismo

Christianity Today 2022 Book Award of Merit (Beautiful Orthodoxy) Many Christians view the Bible as an instruction manual. While the Bible does provide instruction, it can also captivate, comfort, delight, shock, and inspire. In short, it elicits emotion--just like poetry. By learning to read and love poetry, says literature professor Matthew Mullins, readers can increase their understanding of the biblical text and learn to love God's Word more. Each chapter includes exercises and questions designed to help readers put the book's principles and practices into action.

CHAPTER ONE

How Reading Literature Became a Quest for Meaning

Perhaps you do not hate poetry. Perhaps you are simply indifferent to it, or maybe you’re one of the few who not only enjoy it but also read it regularly. Though I’m primarily writing to those in the first two categories, this book is useful for people in all three, because it explains how we have come to read the way we do and how that mode of reading can be improved. The common reading approach for lovers and haters of poetry alike is to try to interpret the poem. Interpretation is typically understood as solving a puzzle or setting out on a quest for meaning. The difference between the lovers and haters is typically that lovers enjoy the quest and haters do not. Both see the purpose as getting to the climax of the quest, but it’s more rewarding for the lovers than the haters. My goal in this chapter is not to convince haters to love the quest. Instead, I want to explain how we came to think about interpretation as a quest for meaning in the first place and how this approach can actually confound our attempts to love the Scriptures.

Most of us do not read only poetry this way. In fact, we tend to read most things as if they contain a meaning we must discover. But poetry seems to present more obstacles to our quest than prose. Informative prose wants to make the meaning clear. The words on the page seem to point directly to ideas. Poetry, on the other hand, seems to obscure its meaning. The words on the page seem to point indirectly to ideas at best. Reading poetry can feel like playing a game with a bunch of complicated and unwritten rules that we didn’t ask to play in the first place. When we are guided to the meaning of the poem, our arrival is often presented as an aha moment, a whisking-away of some curtain that was unnecessarily obstructing our view all along, a completion of a quest. We are code breakers trying to decipher an encryption that only a select few with special knowledge are equipped to understand.

As we will see throughout the book, it is this approach we bring to poetry that creates the very frustrations we think of as properties of the poems themselves. Matthew Zapruder argues that “too many of us have been systematically taught to read poetry as if it is full of symbols that stand in for meanings not obviously present in the text itself. The reasons for the pervasiveness of this idea are complex.”1 But what are the reasons? Why do we think of reading poetry as a quest for meaning in the first place? How have we come to think of reading as getting to the point? This chapter offers a brief history of three major influences that have shaped our modern understanding of reading in general and reading poetry in particular. This history will help to answer the questions I’ve raised here and set us up to consider how our theory of reading (whether conscious or unconscious) shapes, and is shaped by, our attitude and practice.

Imitation

The Greek philosopher Plato developed one of the most influential theories of art in his famous book the Republic. The Republic is a long dialogue between Plato’s teacher Socrates and a handful of young Athenians who ask Socrates to offer his definition of justice, which he does by casting his vision for an ideal city. Along the way, Socrates makes the seemingly odd claim that he would banish poets from his city. When asked why, he leads his friend Glaucon to the conclusion that poetry, like all other art forms, is fundamentally imitative and thus “far removed from the truth.”2 To understand why Socrates is suspicious of imitation, we must understand a little of his philosophy.

Socrates believes that this world we inhabit is a material embodiment of a more ultimate and immaterial reality. One example he gives to help us wrap our minds around this philosophy is that of a craftsman who builds a bed. Socrates asks Glaucon whether the craftsman makes the idea of a bed or if he merely makes a bed. Glaucon answers that the craftsman, of course, simply makes a bed, not the very idea of a bed. The idea of a bed already exists, and the craftsman makes a version of that idea. The idea of the bed must come from a god, Socrates suggests, whereas a bed we can sleep on comes from a craftsman. But then he introduces a painter into the conversation and asks Glaucon what a painter makes when he paints a picture of a bed:

[SOCRATES:]	And is a painter also a craftsman and a maker of such things?
[GLAUCON:]	Not at all.
[SOCRATES:]	Then what do you think he does to a bed?
[GLAUCON:]	He imitates it. He is an imitator of what the others make. That, in my view, is the most reasonable thing to call him.
[SOCRATES:]	All right. Then wouldn’t you call someone whose product is third from the natural one an imitator?
[GLAUCON:]	I most certainly would.
[SOCRATES:]	Then this will also be true of a [tragic poet], if indeed he is an imitator. He is by nature third from the king and the truth, as are all other imitators.3

The poet, like the painter, does not merely imitate the idea of a bed. The poet imitates the appearance of a bed. The problem with art, for Socrates, is that it removes its audience from the truth and asks us to look at an imitation as if it were reality. So what? Well, if we become captivated by an imitation, Socrates argues, we are at risk of abandoning reason and being ruled by fantasy and emotion because an imitation is not bound by reality. It can make of its subject whatever it wishes.

Plato goes on in book 10 of the Republic to introduce a dichotomy between poetry and philosophy. And it is this ancient dichotomy that forms the basis of our hermeneutics of information. Poetry is imitative and harmful to the truth, whereas philosophy leads directly to the truth. Poetry stokes passions; philosophy engages reason. Poetry distracts us from reality; philosophy reveals reality to us. Poetry entertains; philosophy instructs.

This dichotomy was new for the Greeks. Prior to Plato and some of his fellow philosophers, poetry was not only considered a source of philosophy and instruction; it was the source. “Verse was at that time the mark of excellent discourse, the discourse of authority, no matter its object,” argues William Marx.4 Drama, and especially tragedy, was the most prevalent form of poetry in ancient Athens. According to the philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum, in the heyday of Greek poetry, people looked to the poets as their primary sources of ethical instruction: “To attend a tragic drama was not to go to a distraction or a fantasy, in the course of which one suspended one’s anxious practical questions. It was, instead, to engage in a communal process of inquiry, reflection, and feeling with respect to important civic and personal ends.”5 Nussbaum goes on to point out how the very environment of an ancient drama contrasts with that of a modern movie theater because it was designed to facilitate civic engagement:

When we go to the theater, we usually sit in a darkened auditorium, in the illusion of splendid isolation, while the dramatic action . . . is bathed in artificial light as if it were a separate world of fantasy and mystery. The ancient Greek spectator, by contrast, sitting in the common daylight, saw across the staged action the faces of fellow citizens on the other side of the orchestra. And the whole event took place during a solemn civic/religious festival, whose trappings made spectators conscious that the values of the community were being examined and communicated.6

No one imagined these plays (which were actually long poems) to be pure entertainment or to be artistic in some sense that set them apart from the practical realities of everyday life. Poetry was both pleasurable and practical, entertaining and instructional.

After Plato, however, the theory of art as imitation cast suspicion on poetry’s ability to tell the truth. The result was the emergence of yet another dichotomy, that between form and content. If a writer or speaker wants to tell the truth, why decorate it in frivolous flourishes? Why not just come right out and say it directly? Philosophers like Aristotle who rushed to poetry’s defense didn’t disagree that poetry was imitative. Rather, they countered that imitative poetry was good and useful. The literary critic Susan Sontag argues that it was such defenses that gave “birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call ‘form’ is separated off from something we have learned to call ‘content,’ and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.”7 In other words, from the moment the first defender spoke up to vindicate imitative art, poetry’s reputation as imitation was solidified because its value became entangled with the argument for why telling the truth in this imitative form was worthwhile. The case for poetry became a case for why a given content could or should be conveyed in a given form. This separation of form and content engendered the quest for what a text “really says.” Sontag makes the bold claim that “all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis [imitation]. . . . None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.”8 The form of a poem became something we must get through, decipher, move beyond to get to its content.

Though the dominant notion of art as imitation has not...