The Bible - open or closed? (4)

I think that “conversation is the best descriptor we have for the form in which we have received the Bible and for the way in which that form works within the whole canon of scripture” but don't think that has to mean that conversation is a feature of all “the many varied forms that scripture takes.”

My main reason for thinking that is that my argument is that conversation is the best descriptor for “the form in which we have received the Bible” and for “the way in which that form works within the whole canon of scripture.” My argument, therefore, is about the form of the whole canon rather than the form of the parts (e.g. books/genres) that compose it.

Having said that I have been arguing in these posts that both the form of the parts and the content of those parts includes much more conversation than is generally acknowledged by Biblical scholars and theologians. Examples I have used included: the conversational aspects of the Psalms, Epistles and Revelation (form of the parts); and Jesus’ ongoing conversation within the Godhead, his conversational teaching method in John’s Gospel, the retelling of Israel’s story in terms of Jesus that we find throughout the NT, and the many conversations recorded between God and the most significant characters in both OT and NT (content of the parts). However, I certainly don’t want to suggest that all of the forms or all of the content of the parts are explained or informed by the motif of conversation.

I do think, however, that conversation is the best descriptor when it comes to describing the form in which we have received the whole canon of scripture. There is an enormous diversity of texts in the canon of scripture which although they are set alongside each other within the frame of the canon also interact with, speak to, comment on and interpret each other. It is this interaction between the parts of the whole that I want to describe as conversation.

Once you have a frame (e.g. the canon) which includes a diverse collection of different texts, this interaction or conversation can occur in a huge diversity of different ways. These include: different telling of the same events in different ways and to different chronologies (i.e. Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, the four Gospels, or the accounts of the conversion of Saul); retellings of stories in ways that reinterpret the original story (e.g. Paul’s reworking of the Hagar and Sarah narrative, Hebrew’s reinterpretation of the sacrificial system, and Revelation’s reworking of apocalyptic narratives in terms of the politics of the day); passages being interpreted and being capable of interpretation at a number of different levels (i.e. historical and allegorical, as in the Hagar and Sarah narrative); the quoting or paraphrasing of material from one text in another text; and exploration of shared themes in different texts without specific reference one to the other, among others.

I find Josipovici very helpful in describing the way in which this conversational form works as he discusses the opening chapters of Genesis:

“… the chapter advances, by means of the basic pattern laid down in the opening: full repetition, partial repetition, innovation – or any combination of these three elements

… the Hebrew Bible is … concerned with repetition and return

… the Bible works by way of minimal units laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary. This is an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration. Naturally this is made possible or reinforced by the paratactic nature of Hebrew syntax and by the denial of dualism within the narrative. The three aspects intermesh and create a narrative which can spend nine chapters getting from the Creation to Noah and his descendents, or else cover the ground in just four verses, as in Chronicles: ‘Adam, Sheth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jered, Henoch, Methusalah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth’ (1 Chron. 1: 1-4) …

Each new element in Genesis 1 helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows. In just the same way chapter 2 – 3 help bring into focus the theme of division in Chapter 1 …”

Later, Josipovici argues that a “pared-down, reticent style is … the style of the Bible” and that “what it implies is that we can read most episodes in any number of different ways, though always with the sense that other ways are possible.” The narrative, he suggests, always denies us “a point of view above the action” and therefore is not going to help us adjudicate between different readings: “When we think we have found at last a place from which to interpret we find that it too is subject to conflicting interpretations.” Alongside this style, we find that “the events are laid out alongside each other, without comment, and we are never allowed to know whether the pattern we see emerging at one point is the true pattern.”

Such points lead him to conclude that “the Hebrew Bible … chose not to stay with the fulfilment of man’s desires but with the reality of what happens to us in life. We all long in our daily lives for an end to uncertainty, to the need for decisions and choices, with the concomitant feeling that the choices we have made may have been the wrong ones. Yet we also know that life will not provide such an end, that we will always be enmeshed in uncertainty. What is extraordinary is that a sacred book should dramatize this, rather than be the one place where we are given what we desire. But that is precisely what the Hebrew Bible does …”

These approaches present us with an open conversation in which we can participate, as, for example, occurs in Judaism in the Gemarah.

I think this provides a partial answer to the question about the extent to which reinterpretation of stories is actually a conversation: “In what way do the Jewish scriptures respond to the way in which they have been re-interpreted within the passage where the re-interpretation takes place?” The layering of stories and interpretations across the canon of scripture continually brings us back to the question as to whether any one story or interpretation is definitive and closed or whether there is an open ongoing conversation about interpretation in which we can participate. The next part of my argument picks this up in more detail.

Another part of an answer to this question is found in the responses of people in the Gospel/NT stories to the retelling of Israel’s story undertaken by Jesus and Paul. These make it clear that there are alternative perspectives and challenges to these retellings/reinterpretations. So, conversation within the text with the stories being reinterpreted occurs through those that challenge the reinterpretation. Again, this brings us back to the overall structural question of the canon of scripture as to the open or closed status of these stories/interpretations.

In the construction of the Christian Bible the open conversational form of the Hebrew Scriptures is combined with a sense of fulfilment through the forward drive of the story that it tells:

“It’s a magnificent conception, spread over thousands of pages and encompassing the entire history of the universe. There is both perfect correspondence between Old and New Testaments and a continuous forward drive from Creation to the end of time: ‘It begins where time begins, with the creation of the world; it ends where time ends, with the Apocalypse, and it surveys human history in between, or the aspect of history it is interested in, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel’. Earlier ages had no difficulty in grasping this design, though our own, more bookish age, obsessed with both history and immediacy, has tended to lose sight of it. Neither theologians nor biblical scholars have stood back enough to see it as a whole. Yet it is a whole and quite unlike any other book.”

This then means that there is also a conversation/dialogue/dialectic between the open laying of texts alongside each other without comment and the closed forward thrust of the story. The Bible, as a whole, is a both/and: it is both open and closed; both structure legitimating and structure subverting (to use Brueggemann’s terms); both a unity and an arbitrary construct (Josipovici). As a result, there is also a see-saw movement or conversation in our response as readers:

“there is a constant see-saw movement at work in our relation to the books that matter to us: we are drawn to them because they seem to speak to our condition, and we seek to make them more and more our own; but we are also drawn to them because they seem to be other than us, because they guide us out of ourselves into what we feel to be a truer, more real world.”

This brings us nicely to the hermeneutic circle or spiral where the conversation between whole and part and the conversation between reader and text are very much a part of what I am trying to describe. What I am seeking to do, however, is broaden our sense of the extent and variety of ways in which conversation occurs in and through scripture beyond the two conversations that often form our understanding of the hermeneutical circle.

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Noah and the Whale - 2 Atoms in a Molecule.