literary analysis

Sometimes We Fight, Part 6

January 24, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

In my last post we worked through the Apostle Peter’s sermon at Pentecost (Acts 2), looking for doctrinal content. Here’s what we came up with, in systematic theological terms:

Bibliology

The Hebrew scriptures are God’s Word (Ac 2.17) and therefore reliable (Ac 2.16).

Theology Proper

God directs history (Ac 2.23).
God does miracles; history includes some number of supernatural events (Ac 2.22).

Christology

Jesus did miracles (Ac 2.22).
Jesus died by crucifixion and rose again (Ac 2.23-24, 32).
Jesus continues his divine work from heaven (Ac 2.33-34).
Jesus is God (Ac 2.36).
Jesus is Christ, the fulfillment of the Hebrew messianic prophecies (Ac 2.36).

Pneumatology

There is a Holy Spirit (Ac 2.17).

Anthropology

People are sinful (Ac 2.40).

Soteriology

Salvation is available to all peoples (Ac 2.18, 21, 39).
Salvation is available freely (Ac 2.21) through repentance (Ac 2.38).

Eschatology

There is a coming “Day of Yahweh” (Ac 2.20).

When we put all this into our chart, we end up with something like this. (I’ve truncated our data slightly for simplicity’s sake.)

Where do we go from here? Well, we repeat this same process on the other apostolic sermons in Acts, filling in the other columns on our chart. A quick result might look something like this, though a more careful study—which you’ll do, right?—would yield more doctrines in the first column.

And then you see where the overlaps are—which doctrines are most emphasized in this database of sermons. For illustration purposes I’ve simply counted the number of sermons in which each doctrine appears and then sorted the list on that column, with the most common doctrines at the top. You can see that “quick and dirty” result here.

What are the biggest ideas?

The deity of Christ
Forgiveness of sins
The death and resurrection of Christ / witnesses
The reliability of Scripture
Repentance

It’s no surprise that our list includes “the gospel” as defined by Paul in 1Co 15.3-4.

Now, we’re not done yet. As I noted in a previous post in this series, we need to evaluate the other datasets that my friend Tom Wheeler identified in his dissertation, and then we need to compare all the lists we end up with to see if there are patterns there—which there are—as justification for producing a “meta-list,” which should serve as a pretty good indicator of What We’re Going to Fight About.

And then we need to decide where to draw the line. How far down the list do we decide this is a doctrine that isn’t “emphasized”? How far down the list do we go before we decide that we’re not going to fight about that one? I’d suggest that that’s a literary-analysis question: where do you draw the line at emphasis?

Tom’s dissertation has done a good job of that already. But you can do that work yourself, you know. You don’t have to be a scholar like Tom; with the Word and the illuminating work of the indwelling Holy Spirit, you have all the tools you need to do this study for yourself. Maybe you’ll notice something he didn’t. And even if you don’t, you’ll benefit immensely from the study, and you’ll approach doctrinal controversies in this polarized and freaked-out world with a calmness and a confidence that will communicate grace, mercy, and peace to all those around you.

That’s worth the effort, right?

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Application 1 Application 2

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Fables Again, Differently

September 20, 2018 by Dan Olinger 4 Comments

A week ago I posted about possible lessons from Aesop for weather forecasters. This time I’d like to broach the subject again in a very different context.

In my university’s chapel program today, my colleague Eric Newton briefly referred (about 16:30 minutes in) to my experience of having my faith rescued through the study of OT genealogies. Since others may find the story helpful, I share it here.

In seminary I had to study a lot of theology, including aberrant theologies. Those included the first major theological innovation of the 20^th century, neo-orthodoxy, tied to the thinking of Karl Barth. Barth’s system and writings are complex, but the feature that got my attention was his “two-story” hermeneutic. There are two kinds of history, he said. There’s the stuff that really happened, which he called by the German term Historie. That’s the first story of the house, where we live. But there’s an upstairs too, with another kind of history, Geschichte. That’s the stuff that we believe. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t; that doesn’t matter. What matters is that our belief helps us make sense of a confusing world and, more importantly, it energizes an existential experience with God, which is the whole point of being. There’s no staircase in the house; we can reach the second story only by an existential leap of faith.

Neo-orthodox thinkers make this kind of thinking clearer to the average guy by calling the Scripture’s early history “fable.” They don’t intend the term to be an insult; in their minds, it’s a great compliment. Fables are delightful and artful literary works, and they play an important role in our education and broader culture. For example, Aesop told a story about a boy who cried “Wolf!” It teaches us that we shouldn’t lie. That’s important.

Now. In what country did this boy live? In what century?

Ah, my friend, by asking these questions, you’re indicating that you completely miss the point. It doesn’t matter where or when he lived—in fact, it doesn’t matter if he lived at all. The point is the lesson, and historicity is irrelevant. Just learn from the story. Recognize the literary technique, and don’t be such a knuckle-dragging literalist.

Well. That concept hit me pretty hard. What if Barth’s right? What if we’re completely missing the author’s intent? (Authorial intent is a really big deal in biblical interpretation, right?) What if none of it’s true? And then, what’s the point of Jesus being the Second Adam to solve the problem of human sin (Rom 5), if there was no First Adam to originate the sin in the first place?

Maybe it’s all just stories.

At that point in my thinking I made a really foolish mistake. Being too proud to ask any of my teachers—or fellow students—for help, I determined to push through this on my own. That was foolish for a couple of reasons—first, because human beings aren’t designed to suffer alone, and second, because, as I later realized, I was surrounded by people who could have given me the answer without my having to spend weeks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

But, foolishly, I spent some time as a doctoral student at BJU wondering whether there’s even a God, and whether there’s light at the end of this dark valley.

Well, there is light. God is gracious; he knows and loves and cares for his children, and as he always has, he overlooked my foolishness and treated me with grace instead of giving me what I deserved.

I was seeking the answer to the question of authorial intent: did the narrators of early biblical history intend for me to read their accounts as fable, or as Historie? Is there evidence in their literature that would answer that question?

Yes, there is. One day it hit me like a brick. It’s the genealogies.

You see, when you tell the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!” you don’t tell how he grew up and had a son, and then a grandson, and then a great-grandson, and how his 200-greats grandson is the mayor of Cleveland. It’s fable; you leave it in the world of fiction.

That’s not what the authors did. They tied those very early people to the people of their generation. And later authors recognized that and extended the genealogical record through 4000 (or so) years of history to the central figure of history, Jesus Christ himself.

Barth was creative, but he failed to analyze the literature carefully. He missed clear evidence of the obvious answer to the most basic question—what did the author intend to say?

Postscript

Paul tells Timothy that all Scripture is profitable (2Tim 3.16). All of it. Even the boring parts. Even the parts you tell new believers to skip.

Don’t do that. It’s all profitable. It’s there for a purpose. Recognize, embrace, and live in the light of that purpose. My 200-greats grandfather, Adam, would tell you the same thing.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On Reading Job (the Book, not the Occupation), Part 1

August 27, 2018 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Not long ago I posted some thoughts on reading Leviticus and Numbers, so I suppose by this post I’m continuing an informal, as-circumstances-warrant kind of series.

Job is an unusual book. For starters, most Christians have known the story since Sunday school, but hardly any of them know much about most of the book. They know the narrative of the first 2 chapters and the last chapter, and they know generally about God’s speech to Job that is the climax of the book in chapters 38-41, but pretty much all the rest of it—the extended conversation among Job, his three friends, and a young observer named Elihu—are essentially “flyover country.” If you asked most lifelong readers of the Bible to summarize the speeches of Eliphaz as distinguished from those of Zophar, not only could they not do it, but they might not even recognize the names. We’ve missed a lot.

I’d like to comment about a couple of issues connected with reading and understanding the book better.

First is the question of genre. Is it history or fiction? Since we read literature differently depending on its genre, the question matters.

The first thing we notice is that the story seems to stand apart from the historical metanarrative that makes up the rest of Scripture. No one knows where the “land of Uz” (Job 1.1) is; though the place name is mentioned in connection with the Philistines (Jer 25.20) and with Edom (Lam 4.21), no one is even sure that the latter two are the same location as the one mentioned in Job. The word does appear as a personal name in the Israelite genealogies (Gen 10.23; 36.28; 1Chr 1.17, 42), but there’s nothing in all of that information that lets us put Job anywhere certain.

There’s also no reference in the book to any of the patriarchs; the long conversation makes no reference to Noah or Abraham or Moses or David or anybody else that sounds familiar. There’s no unambiguous reference to the Law (Job 22.22?), or to God’s Word in the written sense (cf Job 6.10; 23.12; 42.7).

Job is mentioned by other biblical writers (Ezek 14.14, 20; James 5.11 [Gen 46.13 probably names a different person]). Ezekiel mentions him alongside Noah and Daniel (though there’s an interpretational argument over whether the Daniel here is the same as in the biblical book), both of whom I take to be historical characters, and that to imply that Job is as well.

James alludes to him in a way that implies he’s talking about the character in the book of Job. Does this prove that the story is true? Well, Jesus told fiction stories to teach moral lessons—we call them parables—but they don’t use personal names. (I don’t think his story of Lazarus and the rich man is a parable.) OT writers, including Job himself, refer to a fictional character named Rahab (Job 9.13; Ps 87.4; 89.10; Isa 51.9), common in ancient Near Eastern mythology (and not the prostitute from Jericho). So it’s not impossible that James is using a fictional character to teach a moral lesson.

Some scholars argue that the extended poetic conversation is not likely to have happened extemporaneously—who talks like that, anyway? But we should note that while you and I don’t typically make up poetry on the fly, the poetry of that culture was different in ways that might make poetry extempore possible. Most significantly, their poetry doesn’t have rhyme or meter, which is much of what makes poetry hard for us. They “rhyme” concepts rather than words (e.g. Ps 1.5-6; Ps 24.1-2). And further, there’s no reason to think that the characters in Job couldn’t have taken a few minutes to sketch out their thoughts before they spoke, even perhaps taking notes (in the dirt? on a clay tablet?) while another was speaking, debate-style.

So while the situation is mildly muddy, I’m inclined to think that the events in the book really happened. This means that Satan really appears in God’s presence and that God converses with him. It also means that ancient peoples were a lot smarter than the stereotypical cavemen. Your homework is to think about what other differences the historicity of the book makes.

Next time we’ll look at something else you need to keep in mind as you read the book.

Part 2

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Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 3: Too Many Cooks

August 14, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1 Part 2

And so we come to the evidence: objective evidence that the Bible is, um, unnatural, extraordinary, not like any other books. I’d suggest two lines of such evidence; we’ll look at the first one today, and a related topic later in the week. Next week, we’ll get to Door Number 2.

Door Number 1. Writing a book is hard. Just getting the facts right is hard enough (more about that next time); but doing it artfully, in a way that pleases the attentive reader, is really, really hard. Literary critics delight themselves in finding such artful devices in serious literature—for example, in noting how Willa Cather uses the imagery of wilting flowers to foreshadow the crumbling of the protagonist in the short story “Paul’s Case,” or how Dickens contrasts polar extremes in A Tale of Two Cities, or how an episode of Seinfeld weaves together a seemingly impossible number of storylines so they all come to resolution at the last moment: in one episode George, pretending to be a marine biologist to impress his girlfriend, pulls Kramer’s golf ball from the blowhole of a beached whale. (OK, that last one was ridiculous, and involves stretching the definition of literature almost to the breaking point. But give me some slack; I’m making a point here.)

The Bible does that: it tells a story—or rather, narrates and evaluates a history—in an artful way, bringing it to a resolution that leaves us amazed and deeply satisfied. (How is that evidence of the supernatural? If Dickens can do it, why do we have to bring God into the picture? Fair question. I’ll get to that in a minute.)

The Torah

The Bible consists of two parts: the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament began its life as the Hebrew Scriptures. The Jews call it the “Tanakh,” which is not really a Hebrew word; it’s an acronym, like NASA or YOLO. The “T” stands for Torah, or “teaching,” which is the first 5 books of the OT. In the Torah we read about the origin of the earth, then that of the nation of Israel, then of the covenant that God made with Israel at Sinai, including its stipulations. There’s a lot of talk (especially in Leviticus) of the priesthood, its clothing, its sacrifices, its calendar. Details.

The priests had to do everything a certain way. The amount of detail is overwhelming. Each sacrifice had its own purpose, timing, and procedure. And to the reader’s surprise—it doesn’t work. Oh, God forgives the sins of the sacrificer, and of the nation, but the sacrifices don’t really work. Every morning there’s a sacrifice, and by mid-afternoon the priests have to do it again. The next morning, the cycle starts anew. Every year there’s a Passover, and the next year they have to do another one. The sacrifices don’t last, and that means they don’t really work.

We finish the Torah with a nagging sense of disappointment. We want a priest who can make a sacrifice that works—one sacrifice that gets the job done. We want a priest who knows how to priest.

The Prophets

The “N” in Tanakh stands for nebi’im, or “prophets.” In the prophets we meet men who bring messages from God. But frankly, they’re disappointing too. Many of the messages are obscure. Nathan the prophet tells David that God will build him a house through his son, whom he names as Solomon (2Sam 7). But then he says the son will reign forever. How’s that going to work? And some of the messages are downright bizarre—what’s with Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel in wheel in a wheel (Ezk 1)?

Why are the prophecies so—hard?! Why can’t a prophet tell us—better yet, show us—clearly what God is like, what he wants, how we can know him? We want a prophet who knows how to prophet.

The Writings

The “Kh” in Tanakh stands for khethubim, or “writings.” In the writings we meet the kings—their story in Chronicles, their writing in Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. We want them to succeed. Saul the Tall is (not surprisingly ????) a failure, and God himself selects David, a man after his own heart, and we think he’ll succeed. But he fails suddenly and spectacularly, and his family disintegrates. His son Solomon begins well; God gives him practically infinite wisdom. But by the end he’s worshiping idols. Solomon’s son splits the kingdom, and after that the kings in David’s line are successful only rarely and incompletely.

We finish the Writings, and the Tanakh, disappointed in the kings, wishing for a king who knows how to king. It’s all disappointing, all unfulfilled potential, all promise and no really satisfying fulfillment.

And then we turn the page.

The New Testament

We meet “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Mat 1.1)—perfect prophet, priest, king, who reveals God to us perfectly (Jn 1.1-18), who offers—himself!—as the perfect and final offering (Heb 10.1-13), who reigns now and forever in perfect righteousness and justice (Lk 1.33; Rev 11:15). The Gospels tell us what he said and did; Acts tells us about his successors; the epistles tell us what it all means; and Revelation tells us how it all ends.

A perfect story. Plot, character, storyline. Rising action, climax, denouement. Coherence, bookended by a perfect world destroyed (Gen 1-11) and a better world restored (Rev 21-22).

So how does that evidence a divine source? If Homer and Shakespeare and Dickens and Faulkner could do it, why couldn’t an ancient writer?

Here’s the thing. There was no “ancient writer.” There were about 40 of them, living across about 1500 years. (Yes, critical scholars would say more like 1000 years, but even if they’re right—and they’re not—the point still stands.) None of the writers ever met most of the other writers.

So how did they do it? How did they write a coherent, cohesive, artful narrative? It wasn’t some talented editor who came along at the end and pieced it all together from earlier sources; the OT was in place and ordered before any of the NT was written. The OT writers couldn’t possibly have known the end, and the NT writers couldn’t possibly have influenced or edited the OT writers.

Only an editor could do that. An editor who oversaw the entire process, beginning to end.

An Editor.

PS To be fair, if a book contradicts itself, it’s not really coherent. There are lots of accusations of contradiction in the Bible. In the next post, we’ll talk about that.

Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8