I recently had an opportunity to visit a friend of mine to listen with him to a lecture on the provocative topic of whether or not the Bible is beneficial and therefore should be kept or deleted. Having listened to the lecture and wishing to write about it, I find myself in a quandary. On the one hand I owe the speaker good language since she traveled a fair distance to present her talk and she delivered her presentation with an amiable demeanor. Still I will have little good to say about the lecture, so taking a cue from C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, I propose to simply call the talk “The Lecture,” and I will call the speaker Docilla so that I can confine my comments to the content. So what was my reaction to the talk?
First let me deal with the provocative topic: should the Bible be kept or deleted? I suppose this statement may be provocative hyperbole for “is the Bible still relevant or is it irrelevant?” However I received no clear indication that the title was not meant literally so let me talk to the title from point of view that “delete” really means delete. There are many book ancient and modern which I do not think either edifying or helpful, but that does not mean I would like to see them deleted. Even a badly written book can serve as an example on how not to write. Books that I believe wrong-headed or advocate destructive behavior can still raise important questions. My love of books, my desire for freedom, and my personal commitment to try to find the truth about important questions make me hesitant to destroy any book. Given my perspective, it was a surprise to me that several in the audience (perhaps 3-4 out of 25) had voted for deletion of the Bible. It was a surprise because I had great difficulty reconciling their view that the Bible was such an extraordinarily dangerous book that it ought to be deleted with my own investigation of the contents.
So what about the lecture itself? Had I given the lecture, I would have discussed the history of the Biblical texts and the scholarship surrounding the early manuscripts, the use of the texts by the early Christians and the eventual collection of the sacred Christian writings into the New Testament canon. I would have then gone on to compare and contrast good and bad behaviors that have come out of the application of the principles in these writings from the earliest days to the present.
Docilla did very little of this. It was impossible for me to understand where she stood on these basic questions or even to glean the key facts about the archeological and textual evidence for the historicity of the Bible from her lecture. Furthermore she spent a disproportionate amount of time on extra-biblical writings such as the gospel of Thomas.
Much of the talk centered on the theme that one cannot interpret the Biblical text (or any text I suppose) unless one has the right metaphor to unlock the meaning. I don’t deny that metaphors can be useful in gaining understanding. A metaphor is useful because we can take something concrete and use it to help understand something that is abstract. Yet much of what she described extracted arcane conclusions out of New Testament writings while ignoring what seems plain and straight forward.
On reflection, The Lecture was not a lecture at all, but rather one long story. I’m not completely sure if the story was a work of fiction or non-fiction and perhaps in the mind of Docilla that distinction is not very clear. I suppose there are many benefits to Postmodern thinking that treats everything as a story. But if our passion for story makes us lose sight of what is true and false, I think we have lost a great deal.
Thanks for reading,
Peter