The form and content of the Bible also seem to operate in the same way. Mike Riddell has bluntly described the Bible as “a collection of bits” assembled to form God’s home page[i] while Mark Oakley used a more artistic image when he wrote of the Bible as “the best example of a collage of God that we have.”[ii] Riddell and Oakley both develop their images of the Bible from the recognition that the whole Bible contains, as Oakley says, “different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers” drawn “from disparate eras, cultures and authors” which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states: “The bits don’t fit together very well – sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history.”
Gabriel Josipovici has suggested, that the scriptures work “by way of minimal units laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary”.[iii] This form then affects the content because “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”.[iv] But if all this is purely the case then the Bible would be an entirely random collection.
Riddell and Oakley though both argue that the disparate materials are held together. Riddell says that, “what holds all these bits together is the fact that they somehow represent the continued involvement of God with the world in general and humanity in particular.”[v] Oakley suggests that “held together, they form a colourful and intriguing picture that draws us into its own landscape” and which enables Christians to “glimpse something of the divine being and his life in the world” and to find “a vocabulary for the Christian life.”[vi]
Josipovici is able to make a stronger assertion about the unity of the Bible by identifying the narrative thread that holds together the disparate fragments that form the Bible: “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.”[vii]
What we have then in the scriptures is a both/and. A linear narrative thrust combined with the laying of fragments side by side so that each fragment adds to and challenges the others. The Bible’s narrative thrust is essentially structure-legitimating, a pledge of the stability of the cosmic order, while the laying of fragments side by side constitutes a refusal of closure. What we have, in a phrase that Joel Rosenberg coined to describe the Torah, is “a purposeful documentary montage.”[viii]
[i] M. Riddell, God’s home page (Oxford: The Bible Reading Fellowship, 1998), pps.24 & 25.
[ii] M. Oakley, The Collage of God (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 2001), p.21.
[iii] G. Josipovici, The Book Of God: A Response To the Bible (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1988), p.68.
[iv] Ibid, p.85.
[v] Ibid, p.25.
[vi] Ibid, p.21.
[vii] Ibid, p.42 citing Northrop Frye, The Great Code (1982).
[viii] Cited in Josipovitch, p. 17. Like Josipovitch, Rosenberg states that this montage “must be perceived as a unity, regardless of the number and types of smaller units that form the building blocks of its composition”.
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