Nonconformist Chronicles

The All-Important Question: What Does this Mean?

My previous post related John Shelby Spong's view that the all important question in biblical interpretation is not "Did this really happen?" but "What does this mean?" I agreed to the extent that we Westerners have indeed failed to discern truth in myth, legend, intuition, and poetry. We have rather tended to feel that only that which is literal and objective can be true. So we've spent inordinate amounts of time and spilled tons of ink trying to prove that the Bible is scientifically precise, historically literal, and nowhere contradictory. We have tried to force pre-modern works into a modern mold. 

In terms of the pre-modern and non-literal, some would argue that the creation narrative in Genesis is neither historically literal, nor scientifically plausible. It is rather a poetic prose, true in the sense that it affirms God as the source of all that is good. The description of humanity's failure is also theologically accurate. It's a situation which has consistently repeated itself down through the ages as human beings have sought complete autonomy for selfish ends, resulting in disastrous consequences. 

So perhaps the important question in the creation accounts is not so much whether everything came into being in six literal days, whether a snake really talked, or whether digesting forbidden fruit exposed nudity. But what the narrative means is the all important question. Will we seek to live autonomously with delusions of godhood or will we submit ourselves to living under God's Word which speaks new creation into existence--a Word that transforms chaos into order.

Some believe that the Book of Jonah is a parable as opposed to literal history. So the important question would not be whether Jonah was really swallowed by a fish. The important question is whether we will be a light to the nations, compassionate to everyone regardless of their ethnicity. Or will we allow prejudice, hatred, or vengeance to blind us?

Was the Samson story a Paul Bunyan type tale (as a friend once suggested to me)? Did he really tie three-hundred foxes tail-to-tail using their tails as torches to light the grain-fields? Is it important to believe this is literal history or is the all important moral to this story more about the danger of compromise? 

And did Jesus cast out literal demons? Or was the language of demon-possession the Gospel authors' accomodative language to a pre-modern world in reference to various diseases which at that time lacked scientific diagnoses?   

Moreover, the cosmology assumed in the Hebrew Scriptures is not a scientific description of the cosmos. It is certainly accomodative language as the authors communicate truth within the framework of a pre-modern package.

I'm not saying whether I agree with any or all of the above viewpoints. Let's just say that I'm sympathetic to them and I don't reject someone who holds to these conclusions. (Nor will I be posing these questions in Sunday morning sermons where the point of these texts will be "What do they mean for us?")  

But are there indeed parts of Scripture that simply must be understood as literally true and historically accurate before one is considered "orthodox?" Stay tuned.      

Are the Gospels Literal History?

I believe that the Gospels came about through both oral tradition and through literary dependence upon previous Gospel authors. I've agreed with John Shelby Spong, whose book, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes has shown the New Testament to be largely a midrash on the Hebrew Scriptures in which the stories of old are retold and heightened to describe the God-presence encountered in the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Spong adds to this his comparison of the Gospels with the Jewish calendar, indicating that the Gospel pericopes were designed to expound upon Scripture readings in the synagogue. Spong even shows evidence of knowledge of the undisputed Paulines in the Gospels. The content and structure of the Gospels came about through an elaborate and intricate set of circumstances.  

Spong argues that the Gospels are a liturgical genre as opposed to a literary genre, which in his mind, would rule out the Gospels being literal history reported by eyewitnesses to capture objective reality (p. 93). Here is where I part company with Spong.

Now I do agree with his view that the uncanny similarities between some Gospel narratives and Old Testament narratives are not just mere foreshadowings of the life of Christ. I've argued that the Hebrew Scriptures traditionally viewed as "predictive" prophecy actually had a historical context all their own, typically describing events which happened in ancient Israel. These events were then repeated in some sense in the New Testament and perhaps specifically in the life of Jesus.

But Spong goes as far as to say that God did not plant these "clues" into the ancient text in anticipation of Christ. To do so would be for God to take an enormous literary risk that these texts would be accurately translated and preserved for hundreds of years. While I heartily admit to a very human element in the production and transmission of the Scriptures, I nevertheless feel that God has been behind the scenes providentially orchestrating key events in the history of the text. While I doubt that God micromanaged every detail of the process, mechanically dictating every word, I do believe that he is in some sense sovereign over the text. 

Spong, however, believes that the Jewish-Christian authors simply searched their Scriptures looking for clues about Jesus and then made all the midrashic applications on their own. So the Gospel authors were simply creative enough to find what they were looking for in order to employ their Scriptures to make sense of Jesus. Moreover, they manufactured stories about Jesus from their own imaginations. Spong says that Jesus' Journey to Jerusalem, in Luke 9:51-19:27, is basically a liturgical creation of Luke's that probably doesn't go back to the historical Jesus. 

Spong does not believe that the Gospel writers intended their works to be taken as literal history. But it wasn't until the church finally broke with the synagogue that the New Testament was taken captive by Gentiles who insisted that the Gospels were literal history as opposed to being mainly liturgical and theological. Unlike the Jewish mind, the Western mind---anchored in time, space, and objectivity has always had trouble embracing the truth found in myth, legend, intuition, and poetry. 

So, according to Spong, demanding literalness or historical accuracy from the Scriptures fails to recognize that the Bible is a Jewish book. Literalness read into John led to the Christological and Trinatarian controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries, leading to creeds and councils whose conclusions have become the definition of orthodoxy and thereby the dividing line between who is in or out of Christian circles. Spong sees this as unfortunate. 

Now I do believe that the Scriptures are primarily theological works as opposed to being books about history or science. I also believe that we Westerners have tended to literalize and objectify everything. We have indeed failed to discern truth in such genres as myth or poetry. And some Scriptures may call us to do exactly that. I agree that the Bible is not a science book, but was written from a pre-modern world view, from a time in which miracle and magic were considered very real. 

This all leads Spong to conclude that the pertinent question when reading a biblical narrative is not "Did this really happen?" But the all important question is "What does this mean?" To a large extent, I agree. We've spent too much time trying to harmonize Scripture with science or trying to harmonize the Gospels with one another. To be overly concerned with a harmonization of the Gospels is to miss one author's unique point because we don't allow him to speak without being qualified or restricted by another author. 

I think the all important question really is "What does this mean?" What is the theological point of a given passage? That is usually the most important question. But should this rule out the importance of ever asking "Did this really happen?" For this, we'll await my next post. But I am interested in any questions or comments in the meantime.