Hermeneutics and Blue Parakeets: The Bible as Story

I’ve previously mentioned narrative theology. The point is pretty simple. The Bible is written as a story. Not a “story” in the sense of fiction. Rather, it’s “story” in the sense of “Dad, please tell us the story about how you and mom met one more time!” It’s a narrative. A true narrative. A narrative that changes your identity.

Like all stories, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. McKnight breaks it down —

Beginning (Genesis 1 – 11), and a (long, long)
Middle (Genesis 12 – Malachi 4; Matthew – Revelation), and an
End (Matthew 25; Romans 8; Revelation 21 – 22)

Notice that much of what the Jews call “Law” is really story. Genesis and Exodus are almost entirely story. There are some lengthy passages of what we’d call laws (or statutes), but they are given us in the context of a story.

The portion of the Old Testament we call “Poetry” is filled with poems, but poems written in the context of the story. I mean, Job is all story. The Psalms continually interact with God’s story. 

Just so, the Prophets have some prophecy and some story, but the prophecy is part of the story. It only matters and makes sense when placed in the context of God’s story.

Morsels of law

McKnight contrasts the story approach to some others. For example, some of us see the Bible as morsels of law. We sniff around the book looking for commands to obey (and to impose on others), ignoring the boring poems, history, and prophecy. After all, it’s the obedience that matters. 

This is, in fact, how I grew up. I wondered what the point of 95% of the Bible was? Why not publish an abridged version that just included the commands? Better yet, why not re-arrange the verses so the commands would be obvious to all readers. I mean, the sermons I grew up on required us to hop and leap from book to book to assemble various verses together to prove God’s clear and obvious will regarding how to worship or organize or whatever. It was as though God wanted to make it hard (but obvious to anyone who really wanted to obey God).

McKnight argues from his own experience,

I was a teenage legalist and considered myself one of the Obedient Ones. We happily tossed away a few of the Bible’s commands, like loving our enemies, because we were crusaders and zealots for wholehearted obedience to the commands of God. In their place we added more comandments, and the ones that particularly appealed to were “thou shalt not dance,” “thou shalt not go to movies,” “thou shalt not drink,” and “thou shalt not play cards (except Rook or Dutch Blitz).”

McKnight concludes that this approach to the Bible makes us insufferably arrogant, and he confesses having been that way when younger. I was, too.

Of course, there are commands, and they are important. But taken out of the context of God’s story, they lead to Pharisaism and self-satisfaction.

Morsels of blessings and promises

Some of us think the Bible was written to give us a daily emotional lift. We feed ourselves encouraging, positive verses each day, hoping for promises and blessings because of our positive thinking.

Those of us hooked on blessings are happy, smiling people, until life slaps us across the face and something horrible happens. Then we wonder if our faith is truly real. Where is the God who lives on my calendar and in my daily devotional guide?

God really does promise blessings, of course, and the uplifting verses are quite real and true. But they are part of a much larger story that deal with the brokeness of each of us and the brokeness of this world. The Bible also deals with injustice, despair, doubt, and suffering.

Mirrors and inkblots

McKnight writes, “Some people read the Bible as if its passages were Rorschach inkblots.” (page 48). Republicans find trickledown economics. Democrats find gay rights. Legalists find laws. The emotionally needy find emotional comfort. 

The Bible’s story takes us through all sorts of human experiences, and we learn many wonderful things. Some are consistent with the Republican Party platform. Some with the Democrats’. Most is utterly foreign to either. But if we read outside the story, we can always find something that justifies what we want to justify.

To allow ourselves to be judged by the Bible, rather than using the Bible to judge others, we have to read the entire story as story. As McKnight says, we need to be swept up into the Bible’s story, rather than sweeping the Bible into ours.

Puzzling Together the Pieces to Map God’s Mind

Many of us, especially the scholars among us, want to find the system hidden underneath the story and develop a systematic exposition of what God really meant. Hence, we find the Bible reduced to a “pattern” or a systematic theology. 

McKnight notes that all systems and patterns ignore pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit. This is, of course, why the denominations disagree with each other — they threw out different pieces!

McKnight further argues that the project is too big for humans. After all, if we take the entire Bible and develop an elaborate system that explains it all, we’ve invented something that not a single author of the Bible taught. And, he suggests, the process is hopelessly subjective, as the scholars get to decide what question is being answered — whose puzzle is being assembled? God’s? or the scholar’s?

Finally, McKnight notes that God chose the way he wanted to reveal himself. Who are we to insist that he should have revealed himself through a 5-fingered pattern or a confession or systematic theology?

In short, the danger of re-assembling God word into a human pattern is the danger of mastery. Once we’ve done it, we’re through. We’ve solved the puzzle. Now we no longer need the Bible. Our pattern or confession or system is quite enough — better, really.

Of course, it overstates the case to suggest that we do entirely without a systematic theology. The Story itself is a pattern or a system. The point is that we Christians tend to read the Bible through our systems rather than the other way. We only concern ourselves with those scriptures that deal with the questions our theologians and preachers are interested in, and so we ignore much, if not most, of the Bible. The trick is to never, ever think your pattern or system is anything like the summa theologica of God’s will. The Bible is. What we write is not.

Maestros

Another mistake we often make is to pick one Biblical character and declare him a maestro — the ultimate expert on God’s will — and read all the rest of the Bible through his eyes.

Many Protestants grow up in a Pauline world. All Bible is read through Paul, even the Gospels. Some churches read everything through the lens of the Revelation. It’s all about the endtimes. And others read it all through Jesus.

Now, Jesus is obviously the master teacher. But we can’t fully understand Jesus outside the context of the Old Testament. You have to read Torah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah (among the rest) to read Jesus. Jesus is central. But Jesus isn’t all the Bible, and some of us get trapped in the Gospels.

The Churches of Christ

Well, McKnight has pegged us pretty well — and lots of others, too. We are guilty of all of the above, aren’t we? 

I grew up on Acts. Luke was the master teacher because Luke taught baptism. Paul’s writings were too confusing for us. We couldn’t make heads or tails of Romans. But we knew what Paul meant when he wrote about singing and the Lord’s Supper.

You see, we were all about finding the system or pattern that would make it all simple and easy to obey. Break it all down to five acts or five steps and we could do it exactly right every single time. 

We got there by reading our own prejudices into the scriptures. We wanted a constitution, and so we found a constitution. We searched for laws hidden amongst the irrelevancies, and created a puzzle to solve. And in so doing, we read our story into the Bible and created something that was more us than Him.

The solution isn’t easy, because it’s so very hard to give up our identity. You see, we came to identify ourselves not as people of Jesus but as the people who don’t use instruments and who organize and worship according to the pattern. We identify ourselves with the rules that we found, and so, to escape our legalism, we have to surrender our identity at the foot of the cross. 

It’s not easy to re-discover who we are meant to be. But for us, that’s where it has to start. We need to learn what part we play in the story.