God as Author

Gene C. Fant, Jr.

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781433671463
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

God as Author takes a thoughtful literary approach to understanding the Gospel. Gene Fant writes in the preface:
"Most of us have heard that Christ is 'the Author and Finisher of our faith' (Hebrews 12: 2), so it makes sense that the Gospel would be God's story. As many a church message board has noted so succinctly, 'History is His Story.' In our easy discussions of special revelation, I cannot help but wonder if we
have missed something awe-inspiring that may be revealed by a reversal of the lens that we turn toward narrative. Perhaps the Gospel is not just like a story; perhaps story, narrative in general, is like the Gospel. My clear conviction is that something stands behind the power of narrative. In fact, I believe that Someone stands behind it. There is an Author whose skill and grace imbues the broad range of the stories that we tell. There is a Father who gave us a story to help us understand our place in this world, a story that points back to Him. His story is, in many ways, the only story that we know. When we use that realization as a foundation for interpreting and generating narrative, it changes everything, including ourselves."

1

Making Sense of the Story

When Philip ran up to it he heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” “How can I,” he said, “unless someone guides me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

—Acts 8:30–31

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

—Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), Introductory Notice to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

As a college literature professor, I introduce students to the concept of hermeneutics, the art (always) and science (sometimes) of interpretation. In my freshmen and sophomore classes, only a few students plan to continue in the study of literature, so I have my work cut out in terms of convincing them that this is actually a worthwhile venture.

Many of these students bristle when I try to teach them how to read critically. “Just give us the facts and let us memorize them,” they seem to whisper when my back is turned. My plan, though, is that they will learn how to approach a story and analyze it, not only figuring out the basic trivia that may be gleaned from the story, but also looking to the insights that may be found and, ideally, applied to their own lives.

In my office I keep an object that I sometimes bring to class at the start of the semester. I pass it around, allowing the students to handle it and turn it in different directions. Quickly, they begin making guesses about its identity. From one angle, it looks like a small, funky paper weight; from another, a poorly shaped house. Over the years I have had all kinds of guesses, some reasonable and some comical. Interestingly, with very few exceptions, my students believe from their first glance that the object is made and not natural.

Little by little, I reveal information about it. I tell them that I found it in Florida. Some add guesses that it is an Amerindian artifact. I tell them that I found it on the beach. New guesses move into tools or specific uses for the object. I tell them that I studied Aztec culture extensively when I was in college. Then I turn the object to a specific angle and show them that from that angle it looks like a jaguar’s head, with an open mouth and a perfectly rounded eye. At this point, they usually gasp and say something like “It’s an Aztec Jaguar idol that washed up in Florida!”

My activity, though, is a trick. When I bring them the object, they have no context for interpreting it, for making sense out of it. They do not know if it is something artificially crafted or something that naturally occurred. Their guesses reveal their preconceptions of what such an object might be. In fact, they begin to mold their interpretation to fit these preconceptions even though they have very little actual information about the actual identity of the object. They place their ways of knowing what the object is over and against what it really is. As I add information, their guesses hone in on more specific preconceptions. I have done this for many years, so I have my technique down pretty well. It is fairly easy to manipulate their guesses.

The reality, though, is that while I did find the object on the beach in Florida, and while I did study Aztec culture in college, the two facts are not related. The object has nothing to do with the Aztecs; in fact, it is not an artifact at all because it is not man-made. I found it on a stretch of beach that has a kind of grass that grows through the soft compressed sandstone (I think it is sandstone anyway) that is just under the beach. When I found it, I saw piles of the stuff lying around, with these nifty, almost perfectly round holes where the grass had grown. This one piece had caught my eye, perhaps because I had studied Aztec culture, and its shape reminded me of a Jaguar idol.

In that original context, however, I did not interpret it as an actual idol. I just thought it was nifty, so I picked it up. When I took it back to my office, I realized how neatly it could help me illustrate the concept of hermeneutics.

For Christians, this activity is remarkably similar to how we view the world. On our own, left to our own devices, we grasp after half-thoughts and predispositions, trying to make sense of our world. Sometimes we strike interpretive gold and stumble across truth; sometimes we find ourselves convinced of our own interpretations only to find out, as additional information is revealed, that we have missed important clues or, worse, have been completely wrong.

Devotees of religious pluralism often use the analogy of the blind men who feel an elephant as a way to understand how humans view God. Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck outlined the analogy in this way: a group of blind men tried to figure out the identity of an elephant using only senses of touch; a trunk in one’s hand, a tail in another’s, and an ear in a third man’s hand.¹ In turn, they declared their guesses based on incomplete information. Together, they began to piece together their guesses, attempting to puzzle together what was, to those who had sight of the process, a ridiculous guess.

DeYoung and Kluck’s point was that this kind of blind religious pluralism displays a false humility in an effort to avoid appearing intolerant of or arrogant toward others’ views. As they further pointed out, “What if the elephant spoke and said, ‘Quit calling me crocodile, or peacock, or paradox. I’m an elephant, for crying out loud!’ . . . And what if the elephant gave us ears to hear his voice and a mind to understand his message (cf. 1 Cor 2:14–15)? Would our professed ignorance about the elephant and our unwillingness to make any confident assertions about his nature mean we were especially humble, or just deaf?”² Or, I might add, downright rebellious? God reveals Himself in many ways, including through the Scriptures in particular, wherein He declares, “The whole of My being is much greater than what you are feeling with your blind hands!”

Texts are not elephants, of course, but to some extent, readers are blind men grasping after clues for what they are reading. In some ways, because texts are by nature challenging, it is a wonder that authors and audiences ever connect at all. Literary narratives include the challenges of language (writers and audiences must speak and share the same language), literacy (they must share at least basic literacy in that language), connotation (they must share an understanding of the words of the narrative, which shift over time and culture), the authors’ generative skills (how they transfer thoughts into writing), and the audience’s ability to interpret the text (how they process the text into their own understandings, both communally and individually).³ The very nature of these challenges means that texts cannot be random if they are to be sensible; they must be intentional, both in their generation and in their interpretation.

Contemporary literary criticism tends to exploit the fault lines between these challenges, shifting from the New Critic’s hermeneutics of skepticism about the author to the currently voguish postmodernist’s hermeneutics of outright antagonism toward the author and the text. Increasingly, the emphasis falls on the reader, which tends to convert literary works more into mirrors that reflect and indulge a reader’s narcissism than into narratives that inspire and edify. In this kind of configuration, critics spend their time looking for randomness as they ignore the very patterns and structures that enable the search for the randomness that they pursue.

Writing classes, however, tend to seek a carefully balanced connection between the writer and readers. In expository writing, this emphasis is carefully pursued, with virtually every textbook containing a chapter on “audience,” which discusses the importance of knowing the intended audience and shaping the message of the text to that specific audience. One of the most popular freshman composition texts in the United States, The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, for example, measures a text’s success by “how well it achieves its purpose with its readers.”⁴

Creative writing classes sometimes place emphasis more on the text itself as an art form apart from considerations of audience (Be true to yourself through the text is something of a mantra for creative writers), but the audience issue is still important. In fact, the most common approach to teaching creative writing is called the “workshop,” where students take turns providing their classmates with copies of their work, and the rest of the class then critiques the text, making suggestions for improvement and refinement. These workshops are pretty much focus groups of intelligent readers who provide feedback on whether or not the story makes sense outside of the author’s own mind. The editorial process in publishing likewise underscores this connection between author and audience.

Chief among the critiques made in workshops is the issue not only of whether or not the story makes sense, but also whether or not it rises to the level of securing the reader’s sustained interest. In my classes, I call this the “So, what’s the point?” test. In workshop papers, the worst reaction a writer can produce is that where readers say, “That was lovely, but so what?” If the story lacks a point that captures the reader’s interest, then the reader feels as though the time spent reading was wasted. Many writers, especially beginning writers, have a difficult time getting their ideas into a form where they communicate the point that they wish to make.⁵

The idea that narrative has meaning has been a bristling point for writers for several generations now. Even super-cynical Mark Twain shot a warning across the interpretive bows of the readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”⁶ Twain’s irony aside, readers always have an impulse to determine the meaning of each and every narrative they encounter. Ultimately, hermeneutics asks this very basic question: “What’s the point of the story?” Simple stories, like fables, may have only one point (often called the “moral of the story”), while more complicated stories, like novels, may have a number of complicated points that surface on a variety of levels. All stories, however, communicate something; while experts may not agree on the locus of that meaning, a number of strategies have been developed to help understand stories.

What Narrative Is

Narrative finds its roots in storytelling. It can be oral (the earliest form of tale-telling) or literary (written stories, which I will emphasize in this work). Literary narrative should not be, however, limited to prose formats like novels and short stories. For my purposes here, I use “narrative” to describe any medium’s ability to communicate a story. I follow other literary critics’ practice of employing a very broad definition of the term that includes some poems and most drama.⁷

Most people think of narrative as fictional, which is certainly the most dominant form of storytelling, but it can also be poetic (even a brief sonnet or limerick can tell a story) or historical (the best histories are those that tell stories).

A cross-cultural, diachronic survey of the panorama of human narrative reveals a sweeping range of experiences that are both culturally significant for their original tellers but are also incredibly applicable to times and societies far removed from the source. When these narratives are written down as literature, they enter into a more stable mode of communication, for literary narrative has more permanence than oral forms and is infinitely more likely to be translated than are preliterate forms.

I define literary narrative as “the written expression of shared human experiences.” The fact that it is written indicates a different form of conception, as there are clear differences between the way that we communicate to one another in oral and written contexts. Anyone who has ever tried to read a good essay as a speech knows that it can be a challenge to shape words in new ways (since speech includes so many elements of paralanguage, which impact how the words are perceived). The reverse is true as well, as sometimes moving speeches fall flat on the written page.

Further, narrative is a uniquely human venture. Some years ago, comedian Steve Martin published a collection of short stories called Cruel Shoes. It is a quirky book, not a typical collection at all, but rather one that explores how imagination can be pushed and prodded in bizarre and sometimes disturbing ways. One of my favorite stories is “Serious Dogs,” which was about an intellectually precocious pack of dogs given to melancholy daydreaming and snobbish pursuits like sharing expensive wine and Monet paintings.⁸ The first time I read the story, I thought immediately of the Disney movie ...