Thursday 23 August 2007

More in "Struggling with Scripture" with William Placher looking at genres in the Bible.

Think then how many signals about genre and meaning in the Bible probably go completely over our heads. We no longer know the cultural clues. Sometimes scholars can help explain them to us. But sometimes even the best scholars are missing things or have to confess their puzzlement. Listen, for instance, to a few verses from chapter 1 of Revelation:
I was in the spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, "Write in a book what you see..." Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man...
...how can any of us recover with confidence what that passage would have meant to an early-second-century Christian community?

Placher leads into this piece by setting up what it means to be aware of the cultural setting of a story. He does that by drawing on this introduction to a story: "A minister, a priest, and a rabbi went out on a boat..." We know its the set up for a joke. We know that what comes next is not going to be a type of storytelling. It would be like the set up for any number of ethnic jokes. How we listen to what is said after that opening line is quite important. Every culture has ways of moving in and out of storytelling. Those patterns change in time. To be a faithful reader of the Scriptures, we have to be serious about what we really cannot know or what it is that we simply have to receive from what is offered to us. In the years since I have been a pastor, for example, the scholarly work done on parables and the cultural/social images in the stories has completely changed how I look at the story. They have become so much more full of good useful imagery. Has the truthfulness of God's gracious Reign changed...maybe not? But I now have many more ways of pointing to and highlighting that Reign and possibly even bringing cultural images from today out in order to make the story more rich for us.

Connection: Sometimes it is important to ask, 'What is necessary here?' I find that to be quite important when we are trying to make something out of one verse of the Bible and by doing that, we lose the vision of the whole.

Lord of the Living Word, we long to hear of the fullness of your Reign. Too often we cannot hear it through the many ways we, your people, speak. Remind us of how your Word can be re spoken and rewritten in the forms and shapes of today's language without losing the richness of the stories that have brought us into the faith this far. Amen.