"Name the five books (or scholars) that had the most immediate and lasting influence on how you read the Bible. Note that these need not be your five favourite books, or even the five with which you most strongly agree. Instead, I want to know what five books have permanently changed the way you think."
I enjoyed Philip's autobiographical approach to this meme and will try to do something similar.
1. A Way Through the Wilderness by Jamie Buckingham - This is the book that I think most influenced my late teens and early twenties after recommitting my life to God. I read Risky Living and Where Eagles Soar before this one but this was the one that grounded Buckingham's talk of being led by the Spirit most firmly in scripture as he created parallels between his experiences and the people of Israel's wilderness wanderings. I didn't know it at the time but what I was responding to was Buckingham's paradigmatic reading of the wilderness wanderings. It was reading Christopher Wright's Living As The People of God later that set out the value of this way of understanding scripture. What has stayed with me particularly from A Way Through the Wilderness is the background that Buckingham gives to Deuteronomy 32. 10-12. The image of the mother eagle pushing her chick out of the nest, catching it in the small of her back and then tipping the chick off until it learns to fly is a wonderful image for the way in which God is always seeking to disturb our complacency and move us "farther up and farther in" as C.S. Lewis puts it in The Last Battle.
2. The Book of God by Gabriel Josipovici - This book helped confirm in my mind a hunch about the Bible that I had developed out of thinking about the use made of fragments of materials and images in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the poetry and paintings of David Jones, and the paintings of Marc Chagall. Each of these combines and holds together a series of fragments in such a way that a relation is established between the fragments and, often, a non-linear story told. Eliot is explicit about this at the end of The Waste Land when he writes: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." The diversity of texts, genres, and voices in the Bible seemed to me to be similarly fragmented but held together by the narrative developed by means of the canon. Three books that I read around the same time - The Collage of God by Mark Oakley, God's Home Page by Mike Riddell, and Josipovici's The Book of God - seemed to understanding the form of the Bible in a similar fashion. Josipovici was the most significant as he unpacks both the fragmented form of scripture and the implications for interpretation of scripture being fashioned in this form. As a result, in order to be serious about scripture I think we have to take account of the form as well as the content of scripture and recognise that the fragmented nature of scripture militates against approaches to scripture, such as harmonisation, which view scripture as being essentially linear and consistent when that is not actually the case.
3. Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme and Text by Walter Brueggemann - The first of Brueggemann's books that I read and it remains my favourite for its exploration of the dialectic of the Old Testament between its core/majority/structure legitimating testimony and counter/minority/pain embracing testimony. Brueggemann's insights revealed the extent to which the diversity of materials in the Bible enable a conversation to develop between these two testimonies. His conclusion, like that of Josipovic, is that in the Old Testament this dialectic is essentially unresolved and open. This understanding of dialogue within and between the texts made sense of the fragmentary form of scripture and developed a sense that, rather than being an instruction manual, reading scripture is actually more like participating in a debate or going on a journey of exploration.
4. The New Testament and the People of God by N.T. Wright. This book helped me to understand Jesus as 'a one-man Temple/Land/Torah-replacement movement' i.e. what Israel had been waiting for! The implication of all this is that God, through Jesus, is in dialogue with scripture reinterpreting and re-enacting the story of Israel through his life, death, and resurrection. Wright also provides a means for understanding the authority of scripture when scripture is understood in the more dynamic and open sense that I have been writing about. He describes scripture as being like a five act play containing the first four acts in full (i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus). "The writing of the New Testament ... would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end ... The church would then live under the 'authority' of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion ... the task of Act 5 ... is to reflect on, draw out, and implement the significance of the first four Acts, more specifically, of Act 4 in the light of Acts 1-3 ... Faithful improvisation in the present time requires patient and careful puzzling over what has gone before, including the attempt to understand what the nature of the claims made in, and for, the fourth Act really amount to." Going back to my first book (and confusing metaphors), this is a description of us, as eaglets, learning to flap its wings in order to fly up to ride the thermals of the Spirit in order that our improvisations are Spirit-led. As Wright concludes, he proposes "a notion of "authority" which is ... vested ... in the creator god himself, and this god's story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion."
I see Satan fall like lightning by René Girard - "Girard brings our attention to three facts without which we will never make sense of our lives, our world or our faith, namely: the role violence has played in cultural life, the role mimesis plays in psychological and social life, and the role the Bible plays in revealing both of these things and showing us how to deal with them." Girard also reveals how the developing dialogue and narrative of scripture can critique, deconstruct and expose societal norms such as the scapegoat mechanism. Girard's thesis then gives us both an understanding of the way in which the fragmented, dialectical narrative of scripture can speak to our world (not just the interpretive community, for whom it is normative) and a basis/focus for our improvisations in Act 5 of the play.
Should anyone want to think more about these ideas of and approaches to scripture, I posted a series last year called 'The Bible - Open or Closed?' exploring them in more detail in dialogue with Philip and they can be found by clicking here.
I tag Interim Mutterings, one of the St John's housegroups, for this meme.
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Igor Stravinsky - Symphony of Psalms I.
1 comment:
Thanks for the great list! I've added it.
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