Without a Metanarrative

 Friday after Trinity Sunday

Color: Green

Lectionary Texts:

1 Samuel 4:1b-22

1 Samuel 5

Perhaps our question has moved from "Is there an overarching metanarrative for the whole Bible?" to "Do we create overarching metanarratives to the whole Bible?" to "Should we read the Bible without a metanarrative.

Post-modernism despises metanarratives. Scripture without a metanarrative would be reading sections of the Bible, e.g. the Torah, as something that simply stands on its on, without any particular relationship to anything else. In the early '70's I was taught to read scripture this way. An O.T. professor for whom I was a teaching assistant insisted that we should never read the NT into the OT, that Jesus had nothing to do with the prophets and the prophets had nothing to do with each other. Everything stood independently. 

 

John Dominic Crossan's first major book about Jesus was entitled In Fragments. It was about isolated sayings (aphorisms) of Jesus that had plenty of meaning, but no connection to anything else: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," or "Let the dead bury their dead." Connections are contrivances. 

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John were separate gospels. The first three have connection only in that they use common sources. John has virtually nothing to do with them, and for that matter, virtually nothing to do with the historical Jesus, or so I might have been taught. 

Ecclesiastes not only has nothing to do with the rest of the Bible, it even stands against most of what the Bible says, or so I might have been taught. 

Neither the Song of Songs (a.k.a. Song of Solomon) nor the book of Esther ever mentions God. The former is a romantic love poem; the latter, a Jewish nationalistic victory story. True but there is more to it than that.

Non-canonical early Christian books, such as 1 Clement, The Shepherd of Hermas, or the Gospel of Thomas, should be read and understood in exactly the same way as books of the New Testament. There is no difference. Or so I could have been taught.

 

The canon evolved over six centuries. It did not just fall down from heaven in the King James Version bound in black leather with gilt edged pages and red letters for the words of Jesus. That's true.

No one way of reading scripture can claim any greater truth than any other way of reading scripture, or so I more or less was taught. 

We are better to read the Bible as a collection of different documents that have no specific claim on our thinking or our theology. Or so I may have been taught.

As I now look over what I have just written, I find that I am in fact writing in fragments, short two or three sentence paragraphs. Perhaps this is the influence of what I have been writing about (and the influence of Crossan and post-modernism).

Within the realm of Biblical studies in seminaries and divinity schools (not secular universities' Religious Studies department) all this began to change in the 1980's. The precursor to the change was the work of Yale Divinity School Old Testament Professor Brevard Childs from a decade and two earlier. Chuld's created what he called "canonical criticism." He sought to see the whole rather than its isolated parts. Here are a couple of obvious examples. He wrote a commentary on Isaiah that read it as a whole, not as the distinctive writings of at least three authors. He did not deny the multiple authorship, but he saw the "canonical shape" of the whole book as a whole. Another example: He wrote a book entitled The Old Testament as Canon, which applied canonical crtiticism in an introductory fashion to the entire OT. Then he wrote a book entitled The New Testament as Canon. That was even more of a no-no. OT professors had no right to write books about the NT.  Another radical thing Childs did was to see a Christian understanding of the Bible as including what "pre-critical" (before the 19th century) Christian writers had to say about it. The interpretations of the early church fathers, the reformers such as Luther and Calvin, later pre-critical writers such as John Wesley, all had immense value for our understanding of the Bible. Childs saw not just the big picture of the whole Bible, but the bigger picture of the whole of Christian history.

 

Childs was highly criticized in his time, not as much now. In the 80's literary criticism (narrative criticism in particular) gained importance in Biblical studies. It was no longer just historical-critical method anymore. Meanwhile, lectio divina was coming into Bible Study groups in churches. That's an ancient and  totally different method of reading the Bible. Things have really opened up. There are a lot more possibilities now. 

I don't know exactly where I am now. My devotion solely to historical-critical method has diminished. I'll accept a metanarrative but not the old standard "God's plan of salvation" one. My thinking is rapidly evolving. Who knows? You might even enjoy seeing where it goes.

God of our scriptures,

Lead us to read them. Lead us to read them more and more with greater and greater understanding. They are the major written source our faith. Help us to use them to know you. In the name of you Son. Amen.

Faithfully,

Christian