A Theology of Literature

The Bible as Revelation in the Tradition of the Humanities

William Franke

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781532611759
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire religieuse

With the tools of far-reaching revolutions in literary theory and informed by the poetic sense of truth, William Franke offers a critical appreciation and philosophical reflection on a way of reading the Bible as theological revelation. Franke explores some of the principal literary genres of the Bible--Myth, Epic History, Prophecy, Apocalyptic, Writings, and Gospel--as building upon one another in composing a compactly unified edifice of writing that discloses prophetic and apocalyptic truth in a sense that is intelligible to the secular mind as well as to religious spirits. From Genesis to Gospel this revealed truth of the Bible is discovered as a universal heritage of humankind. Poetic literature becomes the light of revelation for a theology that is discerned as already inherent in humanity's tradition. The divine speaks directly to the human heart by means of infinitely open poetic powers of expression in words exceeding and released from the control of finite, human faculties and the authority of human institutions.

chapter 1

The Bible’s Place in the Tradition of the Humanities

I. Word of God Become Flesh

Certain distinctive qualities of knowledge in the humanities were understood more profoundly, or at least more intriguingly, in antiquity and the Middle Ages than they are today. This applies particularly to the knowledge conveyed through literary texts. The nature of such knowledge has in some ways been obscured through the scientific approach of modern philology to textual analysis. With the rise of modern empirical science as the dominant paradigm for knowing, texts taken as specimens for analysis are dissected according to the will and criteria of a knowing subject considered to be wholly external to them. Previously, it was possible for the text to exercise sovereign authority in determining its own meaning and in interrogating the reader and potentially challenging the reader’s insight and very integrity.

Bound up with this sovereignty, the poetic text was capable of assuming a theological aura. This is most evident and explicit in the case of the Bible as paradigmatic text. However, before the secularist turn of culture in modernity, certain other literary texts, too, were attributed a quasi–prophetic authority and revelatory power. They were treated as authoritative sources of an event of truth in a sense that we are now in a position to recover thanks to what can be called the “post-secular” turn of postmodern culture.1 Part of my purpose in what follows is to develop for interpreting the Bible an approach freed from secularist dogmas that reduce texts to inert objects for our examination, thereby exorcizing their authoritative voices and preempting their ability to speak to us and so to structure the encounter with the reader in their own way. This approach can be extended from the Bible to humanities fields and literature more generally.

I carry out such extensions to other books most programmatically in The Revelation of Imagination. Rather than understanding the humanities as some lesser kind of science, a clumsy application of scientific method to a more recalcitrant sort of material, I propose to understand the whole liberal arts curriculum (which traditionally included the language arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, but also the quantitative sciences of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music) from the point of view of the humanities. Seen from this angle, liberal learning in science and arts alike shows up as driven by the human interests that motivate all search for knowledge. Such knowledge, moreover, as is clearest in the case of the knowledge gained through humanities texts, turns out always to be in some way self-knowledge—which entails above all a knowing of one’s own limits and of one’s place in the overall scheme of things. This is what used to be called “wisdom”—or, in the Latin humanist tradition, sapientia.2

Taken as reflecting on ourselves, humanities texts are not objects of scientific analysis so much as partners in dialogue. If this is so, then their meaning must change over the course of history, for it depends essentially on how they are read by diverse readers who exist in changing historical contexts. Reading is a process of projection, of finding oneself and one’s human concerns in the world projected by the text, as well as of mapping the text’s concerns onto one’s own world of experience.3 Even if the text, as a sequence of markings, stays literally the same, humanity or the individual reader, the other partner in the dialogue, undergoes continual change. The text’s meaning changes, accordingly, with each new interpreter and with each new era of interpretation, and this mobility belongs to its own internal life and structure. The dimension of reading, taken as intrinsic to the text, lends it its dynamism and its living significance.

The Bible is arguably the most eminent example of this life-process inherent in a work that is passed down from generation to generation.4 It embodies the relationship of Israel to its past and to its tradition not as an artifact available for objective analysis but as a partner in dialogue.5 The Bible, moreover, presents itself as a dialogue between divinity and human beings interpreting their common life as a response to God’s calling. There is thus also an explicitly theological frame for the “dialogue” within the Bible between numerous different phases and strata of a people’s history. This history extends far beyond biblical times and indeed all the way to our own contemporary world, since in each period the dialogue has to be renewed on the basis of new situations and sensibilities, both within faith communities themselves and in their broader cultural contexts.6 This history must always be appropriated anew in every age in order to achieve its full meaning. Only so may it truly be said that the Word “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

This majestic and quite astonishing phrase has specific doctrinal meaning when read in the context of particular confessional communities, such as churches, but it also announces a general interpretive principle: the meaning of tradition is experienced only in its application to life in the present. This application is carried out by countless communities in different contexts and, in the end, also by single individuals. Individuals must appropriate the words of Scripture—make them “flesh” and give them a meaning in terms of their own lives.

As the “Word of God,” therefore, the Bible provides a uniquely privileged model for humanities texts, specifically for their establishing a dialogue with the reader, the one to whom they are addressed. The very notion of the book as such—as authoritative, as not just an object among objects but as circumscribing and transcending them, and as the voice of Truth—is intimately bound up with the example of the Bible and with the influence it has exerted down through the ages. In religious and in secular spheres alike, the Bible is somehow not on the same level as other books. And yet the Bible, as a “great book” in this tradition of texts, and as embodying a revelation of truth living in history through reinterpretation in continually changing contexts, is exemplary of what holds for the rest as well: we can and should learn to read other great books of imagination as revelatory in a similar sense. This book, proverbially the Book, is absolutely fundamental not only to religion but also to the whole secular tradition of Western humanities. That tradition is itself exposed in its light as far from purely secular. And reciprocally, divine revelation in the Bible, rather than being lost or denied, shows up in this more widely diffused light as concretely and compellingly realized through its endless worldly transmogrifications as interpreted from age to age and across cultures.

II. The Ongoing Process of Translation as a Dialogue Among Cultures

Despite its authoritativeness, this imposing book, perhaps more than any other, has undergone continuous transformation. In the first place, this is so because the Bible is deeply enmeshed in the process not only of linguistic but also of cultural translation. To begin with just the linguistic level, it is without question the most translated of all books. It has been translated into virtually every written language, as well as being the object of an endless succession of different translations into the same language, as in the case of English.

Translation into English, which has been continuous from Anglo–Saxon times, began to approach familiar forms with the work of William Tyndale in the early 1500s. This translation, together with other sixteenth-century translations, like Miles Coverdale’s and the Geneva Bible, became the basis for the translation commissioned by King James I of England known as the Authorized Version (1611). Widely accepted as standard, it was at various times revised, and by the nineteenth century, when earlier manuscripts had been discovered and numerous errors of translation detected, a revision was undertaken that produced the Revised Standard Version.7

Even more importantly, translation in a cultural sense is constitutive of the ongoing tradition of the Bible. Such cultural translation, in effect, is undertaken already within the Bible itself, signally by Saint Paul, who says that he became all things to all men so that by all means he might save some (1 Cor 9:22). Indeed the Bible is not, like science, cast into mathematical language that is the same for all everywhere. The Bible, by its very nature, speaks into the particular historical situations of individuals and their specific cultures, tailoring its message to what they are ready to receive and understand. This phenomenon is already reflected internally to the work itself again by Paul in his preaching to the Athenians as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.

Paul begins by citing the Greek philosophical conception of God’s unknowability as expressed in the inscription “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” that he happened to see on an altar in the city as he was being led to the Areopagus by philosophers who were eager to have this “babbler” explain his strange new doctrine. Against their avowed ignorance, Paul proclaims the self–revelation of God in Christ: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:22ff). Paul casts his message in terms that answer to and challenge the Greeks’ philosophical culture. He works from their admission of the vanity of their search for “the Unknown God.” Indeed, God remains an unknown to the intellect alone. But shifting the ground out from under them, Paul affirms that the one true God who is hidden from the high...