Tod Linafelt on the Bible's literary merits

In this article published at The Chronicle Review, Tod Linafelt critiques James Wood's approach to the Bible in the latter's recent book, How Fiction Works.

Linafelt, an associate professor of biblical literature at Georgetown University, opens the article on this note:

It is hard to deny that in many respects the Bible is the most unliterary work of literature that we have. Saint Augustine, already in the late fourth century AD, confessed that biblical style exhibits "the lowest of language" and had seemed to him, before his conversion, "unworthy of comparison with the dignity of Cicero." It is easy to see what he means. Biblical narrative especially (things are different with biblical poetry) tends to work with a very limited vocabulary and consistently avoids metaphors and other sorts of figurative language, evincing a drastically stripped-down manner of storytelling that can seem the very antithesis of style.

Then, readers have not traditionally gone to the Bible in search of literary artfulness but rather for its religious value — that is, as a source of theology (What can we learn about God?) or of ethics (What can we learn about morality?). For Augustine, as for so many religious readers after him, the Bible's theological truths and ethical teachings won out over its literary art or lack thereof.

Linafelt goes on to explain how Wood's approach to biblical narratives and characters missed a few things, and in the process, he offers some fascinating insights into biblical literature. Read the full article here.

The NCAA tournament and Ecclesiastes

I was shooting baskets in the driveway when the ball went half way into the hoop and bounced three or four times within the rim before popping out.

That made me wonder about the reliability of preparation, despite my belief that one must always prepare.

It seemed preparation is an essential part of what is necessary to succeed.

Yet only part.

The wise man in Ecclesiastes said “speed does not win the race nor strength the battle…time and chance govern all” (New English Bible).

Time and chance are inevitable factors in the NCAA tournament.

Bet accordingly.

War and poetry in a Mt. Vernon, Iowa, Presbyterian church

When her congregation became divided over the war in Iraq, a liberal Presbyterian minister found that the patriots in the pews didn't want her quoting parts of the Bible. But Emory Gillespie ultimately found comfort among books of poetry and other war-weary clergy. She tells her story here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/feature.onpoetry.html?id=179405

Questioning the Bible

Christianity is conceptually difficult because it presupposes that a person can think the right things and know the right things to do, but he will still either fail to act perfectly or fail to act consistently, due to a fallen nature. Nobody gets to perfection in this life, even if some believers claim to have outlined the perfect system of belief, worship, doctrine and practice.

Most of Christian practice and worship, to some extent, is based on revelation. Revelation is tricky, because it assumes that God has spoken to humankind and humans wrote down what He said, and that the recorded revelation is to be valued more highly than the human faculty of reasoning. The clincher, however, is that believers use their reasoning to interpret and apply revelation, which seems to give credence to the point of view that humankind’s reason was not totally warped and completely marred by the Fall. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is supposed to enhance the Christians’ faculties of reasoning regarding interpretation of Scripture, yet many of those who claim to have that indwelling just happen to disagree with one another on their interpretations of doctrinal and theological issues that intersect with the Bible.

However, none of that challenges the Bible’s value. I once heard someone say (I cannot remember who) that plenty of intellectually inclined people spend their time questioning everything, but don't allow anything to question them. The Bible, at very least, is one of those books that questions its readers. The questioning is not always in the form of a question; sometimes the questioning occurs in the context of assumptions made in the texts. Jacques Ellul, the French Protestant thinker, said in the book In Season, Out of Season: “[T]he Bible is not a recipe book or an answer book, but the opposite: it is a book of questions God asks us.”