Perhaps it's the first lesson a minister should teach: How to read. Reading the Bible is such a tricky thing that it brings with it a host of other practices.
Saying that seems almost seems basic to me, but I've learnt over the years that it isn't obvious. Prayer, loving and serving others, participation as the Body of Christ -- all those come before, with and after reading the Bible with understanding.
If we are to "read, learn, mark, and inwardly digest" Scripture (as the old prayer petitions God teaches us to do), we need to think long and hard about what it means to "read".
I have a thesis about the difference between being literary and being literal: The more literal, the less literary a person is likely to be -- and vice versa. To plagiarise Paul, the literal crucifies, the literary resurrects: The world's (and Word's) Meaning, lest we forget, walks through closed doors. "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant" (Emily Dickinson).
It's an interesting fact to me that fundamentalism is predominantly a Protestant phenomenon, a reductio ad absurdum of the Reformers' emphasis on the literal meaning of scripture to the exclusion of the medieval "fourfold vision" (Blake). Is there a lurking fear here of a connection between polyvalence and polytheism? How ironic that, on the contrary, an insistence on a single, solid, certain meaning -- i.e. semantic closure -- is indicative of idolatry. The burning bush is the horticulture of divine deconstruction, and the golden calf is bull.
Instead, that traditional four-fold sense of Scripture is so beautiful precisely because it's sensus plenior -- plentiful meanings that enrich the lives of the faithful beyond the deadening weight of literalism. Again: The literal crucifies, the literary resurrects.
No where is this more true than with the Jesus narratives. Again: Hard to read those narratives in a literal way and come away with anything except a dead man's body.
Because that Protestant literalism goes hand in hand with the deenchantment of nature, which -- this is the good news -- entailed the rise of the natural sciences, but which also -- and this is the bad news -- issued in the evacuation of God from the material world, soon followed the absence of God from the world of culture. Modernist atheism itself is the spawn of biblical literalism (Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism). And when belief did a bunk, it was the priesthood of poets that helped keepthe rumor of transcendence alive. Just read some William Blake or Walt Whitman.
With that disenchantment came the stripping of biblical imagination. So Chesterton rightly observed a "combination between logical completeness and spiritual contraction". And he said: "Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so makes it finite". There is also the spiritual contraction, the failure of imagination, of legalism and moralism. Hence RS Thomas' description of Welsh Nonconformity as "the adroit castrator of art".
Literalism results is some really flattening of the "full sense" of Scripture. One of the great filmic send-ups of biblical literalism: The opening scene of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The camera pans to Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount, and then to a group at a distance where our Lord's voice doesn’t quite carry. "Blessed are the cheese makers", one character hears. "What's so special about the cheese makers?" asks a woman. "Obviously it is not to be taken literally",her husband replies; "it refers to any manufacturer of dairy products".
While it's humor, it points, laughingly, at a real problem with literalism. Stripped from the fuller contexts of prayer and worship and Kingdom, and exposed to a single demand for single meaning, the Bible loses its divine mission to narrate the world in faithful terms.
We only inhabit a world we can describe. A literalist world is akin to living in Abbott's Flatland. Multidimensional characters -- like Father, Son and Holy Spirit -- don't have much a chance of being understood. It'd be like a line trying to describe a sphere.
Of course, theology is a science. I'm a Barthian, after all. But I think theology has to employ stunning rhetoric and stirring imagery to narrate the Triune God. Simple propositions just won't cut it. That's why I think Mozart's passion, Beethoven's humanity, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamozov and Cervantes' Don Quixote, or Melville's Moby-Dick, or even Scooby Doo (as I tried to say in my last post) have as more to teach us about reading the Bible than simple logical inference. Theology is a cathedral, stained glass windows and all, the builds and expands by reading literarily, not literally.
Which shouldn't be the least bit surprising. After all, God-talk is impossible without the deployment of analogy and metaphor, and the Bible is incomprehensible apart from a narrative hermeneutics. Is it not therefore a scandal that, until recent times, theology has been in thrall to an ontological and epistemological captivity -- and inevitable that it would take a Catholic, Hans Urs von Balthasar, to write a theological aesthetics and dramatics? Is not faith itself an imaginative perception of reality?
Take ethics as a test case. Literalism demands rules. Answers to moral problems that are decontextualized. It's the ethical equivalent to getting all the answers from the back of the (good) book. So what would Jesus do? Teach a parable! Subversive speech for a literalist, because it opens the hearer's mind up to the possibility of hearing wrongly. You have to pray for discernment to get it right.
One of my Duke New Testament profs (Richard Hays) puts it this way: "The symbolic world as context for moral discernment" is fundamental to the entire New Testament (The Moral Vision of the New Testament). Jesus says: "The Kingdom of God is like this ..." He first tells a story. We have to enter the story, work it out, then act it out.
There's still room for rules, but they're "perspicuous descriptive summaries of good judgments" (Martha Naussbaum). They function heuristically. The biblical ethical highlights are first agency and action, dispositions and desire, time and telos. To live Christianly, we need to inculcate habits appropriate to the development of Christ-like character. Moral theology works best when it tells the stories of the saints. Christian ethics is narrative ethics, where the script is unfinished and improvisation is essential. The Christian life is jazz. The Christian life is a play, and we're improvisational actors in the Third Act.
My moral here? Literalism is a dead end for Christians. For the first 1500 years, we knew that, too. Only when we started dichotomizing and atomizing things that shouldn't be divided and dissected, did we end up with a literal messy, dead Body.
If we continue in the willful ignorance of reading the Bible as literature then our mere ignorance is going to be continually more dangerous spiritually. Witness the nonsensical interpretations of biblical apocalypse by the religious right and its pernicious influence on American foreign policy in the Middle East.
This is why I think one of my other Duke profs -- Stanley Hauerwas -- got it right. We must first "unleash the Scripture" from the "captivity to America". Both liberal (historical-critical) and fundamentalist (literal) approaches to biblical scholarship have corrupted our use of the Bible. The Bible can't make sense when ripped from its context of the people who worship God.
Sitting alone in a hotel room won't get you very far with this book. Sorry, Gideons. "How can they understand unless someone explains?" (Acts 8.31). They can't. Because taking it literally isn't enough. It must be taken literarily.
If we pastors should be community theologians, community theologians should be writers-in-residence, exercising what Yoder called "word-care", and teaching their folk how to read with understanding.