A Theology of Literature

The Bible as Revelation in the Tradition of the Humanities

William Franke

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781532611025
  9781532611766
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532611759
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria religiosa

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.  

CHRIS BENDA: The main title of your book, A Theology of Literature, is rather expansive in scope - it's the title of a manifesto - while the subtitle, The Bible as Revelation in the Tradition of the Humanities, narrows the focus to a particular text. This title seems to adumbrate your conception of the relationship between literature and the Bible. What is that relationship?

WILLIAM FRANKE: Picking up on your suggestions, I would say that the book is a manifesto for literature as a revelation of the highest sort of truth of which the human heart and intellect are capable, and at the same time a manifesto for theology as the source and core of traditions of human knowledge. The Bible is taken as an outstanding example of both types of discourse, literature and theology, in some of their most marvelous and miraculous revelatory capacities.
 
CB: In the introduction to your book, you ask, "What is a theological reading of the Bible, and what is a literary reading?" This question suggests different methods, different purposes, different outcomes. But you put forward another way of thinking about the relationship between the theological and the literary. What is that way?

WF: The usual idea of the "Bible as literature" is that one can read the Bible just as good literature without presupposing any kind of religious belief. This makes it palatable to many who would otherwise not be interested. My approach, likewise, is to read the Bible for all that it is worth as literature, but I find precisely there the Bible's most challenging and authentic theology. Understanding literature in its furthest purport requires a kind of belief in language and the word. It entails a hopeful, loving, and faithful sort of understanding of what is said, and that already constitutes the rudiments of a theology. This is to take the Bible as an especially revealing example of a humanities text. The greatest of these texts generally contain an at least implicitly theological (or sometimes a/theological) dimension to the extent that they envision the final purpose of life and the meaning of the world as a whole. Whether or not they speak of "God," such texts are in a theological register wherever the unity and origin of existence are in question. Personalizing this origin as "God" is one interpretation that remains inevitable and imaginatively compelling for us, since we are persons.
 
CB: You are not reading the Bible as literature in the same way that many others have been doing over the last several decades (even though Robert Alter, one of the foremost practitioners of that art, appears frequently in the pages of your book). Which aspects of the "Bible as literature" approach are, in your view, problematic, at least for your project, and which do you find of continuing value?

WF: The tendency to reduce the Bible to mere literature is the approach that I wish to eschew. I emphasize that the Bible is truly revelatory as literature. This enables us to understand theological revelation, too, in a non-dogmatic sense, as having a much more general human validity. Appreciating the literary qualities and excellence of the Bible remains as crucial to my project as to the traditional approach. However, I stress that these literary features are not merely aesthetic effects or ornaments. They can be revelatory of the real. The ultimately real and true, which exceeds objectification and its inevitable oppositions, cannot be apprehended except through the imagination.

CB: When you speak of the Bible as revelation, what do you mean?

WF: I mean especially that it enables uncanny insight into the nature of reality as a whole and in its deepest core. Revelation conveys an infinite intelligence of life and of everything that concerns us as humans. I recognize knowledge as "revealed" to the extent that it rises beyond ordinary limits to a degree of knowing that somehow fathoms the whole or total or infinite. This means for many that revelation comes from God. But even before presupposing that we know anything about God, we can simply let revelation emerge from this extraordinary capacity of the mind to transcend itself toward what it cannot comprehend. In certain encounters with others, we can experience an infinite depth of love and life that boggles the mind and exceeds comprehension. It can transform our lives. Theological revelation is a compelling interpretation, handed down over generations in the human community, of this register of experience.
 
CB: You seem to make a distinction between revelation and theological revelation. What is that distinction, and what import does it have for your argument?

WF: No, I would rather emphasize the continuity between theological revelation and revelation in a more general, phenomenological sense of things simply coming to be known or openly "disclosed." This is important for keeping theology connected with the rest of human knowledge, although human knowledge itself, all along, has also harbored something that transcends it and all its finite means. I say "all along" because this problematic of the self-transcendence of knowledge towards an extra-worldly Other can be traced to the Axial Age in the middle of the first millennium BCE. Of course, a relationship with the Other who reveals himself or herself or itself as God belongs to the full sense of theological revelation as understood in biblical tradition. I consider this as a degree of revelation of our relationship with others envisaged in its absoluteness.

CB: What do you mean when you talk about the "poetic potential" of language? Does all language have such potential, even what we might not typically think of as poetic - or even literary?

WF: Language has infinite potential for meaning, and poetic language shows and exploits this potential most intensively. Language can be thought of as beginning with one word like "OM" that means everything all at once. By a process of disambiguation, more limited and specific meanings are differentiated from each other and assigned to different words. However, poetic language reverses this process and allows us to hear the multiple meanings buried in our metaphors and to divine the original unity of meaning in language behind the rationally differentiated senses of words in the language that we pragmatically employ, yet with loss of its potential wholeness of meaning.

CB: Your book is concerned with the Bible as a humanities text. What is a humanities text and what does a humanities text do? Might we think of any text as having the potential to be a humanities text, as long as it is read "humanistically"?

WF: Yes. Being a humanities text is a matter of how a text is read. But certain texts lend themselves more than others to touching on matters of deep and perennial human concern: life and death and love and war, greed and heroism, suffering and hope for liberation, redemption, etc.

CB: You state that, prior to modernity, texts, including the Bible, "exercise[d] sovereign authority in determining [their] own meaning and in interrogating the reader and potentially challenging the reader's insight and very integrity." In secular modernity, by contrast, "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." What implications have modern, secular readings of the Bible, and of literature more generally, had for human knowledge and, indeed, for human existence; and how does our present time - what you call "the 'post-secular' turn of postmodern culture" - change how we relate to the Bible and literature?

WF: The modern, secular era is the era of the individual knowing subject. The self-conscious human subject becomes the ground and foundation of all knowing, emblematically with Descartes's "I think therefore I am" as the inaugural proposition of modern philosophy. Hegel construed the history of philosophy this way. Texts become artifacts created by finite human subjects. Prior to this modern era and its constitutive Narcissism, the creation of the text was a much more open affair. It was not under the control of a unitary finite subject, the author. Human authors could be channels for revelations from beyond their own ken. Readers could explore texts for revelations from a higher authority than just the author's own intention. Augustine's reading the Bible as meaning infinitely more than its presumable human authors, starting with Moses, were able to comprehend is a good example (Confessions, Book X-XIII).


CB: You quote John 1:14 ("The Word became flesh and dwelt among us") and claim that this statement "announces a general interpretive principle: the meaning of tradition is experienced only in its application to life in the present." Could you unpack that a bit?

WF: Meaning in literature and life is much more than just an intellectual sense or dictionary definition. How words mean for us is rooted in our way of existing in the world. They have to take on our own flesh and dwell in and with us in order to realize their full potential to signify. This fact is conveyed poetically by the doctrine of the Incarnation that is clairvoyantly and beautifully expressed in the Gospel of John.

CB: A Theology of Literature largely consists of explorations of the revelatory aspects of varying literary genres in the Bible. You look at mythology, epic, history, prophecy, apocalyptic, literature, poetry, and gospel. In the conclusion of your book, you suggest that "[a]ll of these genres, in some manner, are summed up and recapitulated in the Gospel." This is convenient, since we can't discuss each of these genres in depth. How, in brief, does the Gospel provide such a summation and recapitulation?

WF: The gospel is a prophetic word in which the archetypal myth of Genesis and the epic history of Exodus and the words of the prophets are fulfilled by the apocalyptic event of Christ as Savior. It contains the life history of the Redeemer and includes many of his own sayings uttered with all their poetry ("Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin," etc.). It brings all these various forms and genres of revelation to a culmination in a word that exceeds all genres, not least history, in order to recast the mold of meaning and the very meaning of "truth." Its truth is made in being enacted and incorporated by those who believe in it and live it. In the terms of I John 1: 6, these are those who would "do the truth."

CB: Your book is able to cover significant portions of the Bible despite its brevity, but of course it can't cover everything. The legal materials are one type of literature that doesn't get extended treatment, so I'm curious how you might understand them as revelatory texts within the tradition of the humanities.

WF: The legal materials fundamentally express a relationship with God. They enable Israel to live in fellowship with the Lord and as sanctified by his love. "O Lord how I love thy law!" (Psalm 119: 97) exclaims the psalmist. The legal prescriptions in the Bible reveal God and the way to God in very particular circumstances and social conditions. But the relationship with God that they model is potentially valid in all times and places for those who wish to embrace the law as a gift for living in intimacy with the Almighty.


CB: What dangers might accompany the recovery of texts as authoritative sources of truth in our post-secular, postmodern age? How might those dangers, should they exist, be avoided or met?

WF: The authority of texts read in the perspective of a theology of literature never exempts the readers from responsibility for the implications and consequences that they draw from the text. The authoritativeness of the infinite potential for meaning that is inherent in these texts is in a dimension of depth that underlies all meanings and all being and all creatures. It does not valorize some over others. These determinations are always made by human beings, and they alone bear the responsibility for their choices and acts. The power and authority of the text resides in its infinite potential before the emergence of any divisive distinctions and oppositions. This type of authority of the text does not absolve humans of responsibility. It rather reveals their infinite responsibility for whatever authority they claim or evoke. They give this authority a determinate shape and particular application that is all their own. They are answerable for whether or not their interpretation respects and protects all creatures and creation.

Questions by Chris Benda, Divinity Librarian, Vanderbilt University

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...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From the Bible as Literature to Literature as Theology
• Chapter 1: The Bible’s Place in the Tradition of the Humanities
• Chapter 2: The Genesis Myth: Existence as Revelation
• Chapter 3: The Exodus Epic: History and Ritual
• Chapter 4: The Prophetic Voice: Inspired Interpretation of Historical Destiny
• Chapter 5: The Writing of Revelation: Witness and Address
• Chapter 6: The Gospel Truth: Personal Knowing and Miracle
• Conclusion: The Bible as Exemplary Humanities Text
• Bibliography