“… whoever reads, let him understand …”
(Matt. 24:15, NKJV)
The following three teachings will veer off of the course of our overarching discussion, but for a specific and motivated reason. Although few believers ever engage in this activity, it is of great importance that we sometimes stop and look at the processes we use for engaging with Scripture. This means that we need to be accountable for why we read the Bible as we do. Few people ever reflect on their reading style. Matt. 24:15: “… whoever reads, let him understand …”
In his book World Without End (p. 67), Roger Pilkington speaks about Gen. 1-3, and calls it “this factual inadequacy of the Genesis concepts”. He explains that right at the beginning of the Christian era the older teaching’s understanding of the events of creation had to necessarily be re-interpreted in the light of the opening verses of the gospel of John. Up until the formulation of John 1, believers had to necessarily believe that God had brought about an external universe, but John’s deep-seated revelation that the creation is internal, that it had developed from within God, was part of God, majorly shifted the horizons of understanding of believers of the time.
In the current subsection of these teachings we are trying to find out what Scripture has to say about what happened before time. If this is possible we will for instance have a better understanding of what the completion or perfection of all things entails, what lies in the future, which is to say: how things are brought together in Jesus as the Yes and the Amen: “These things says the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God …” (Rev. 3:14). In this way we come to know, in a discursive fashion, “the Principle of God’s creation” (NJB), from beginning to end.
The word discursive, used above, warrants some explanation. It is derived from the word discourse, a more formal synonym for words like discussion, or speech, or lecture. Our use of the term borrows from how it is distinguished in social psychology, but is more firmly rooted in philosophy, critical theory and discourse analysis. Interestingly enough it is not often employed in Christian theology, although it is employed in Islamic thought.
In social psychology, an approach of Discursive Psychology is marked by specific relational themes that are found in conversation, text and images. The latter is presented as a living construction site, “wherein all such presumptively prior and independent notions of thought and so on were built from linguistic materials, topicalised and, in various less direct ways, handled and managed” (J. Potter, Representing Reality, p. 37). This sounds like a mouthful, but is actually very simple. It proposes a mechanism for analysing what is happening in another person’s psyche, through studying their language, texts, arguments, the way they phrase or imagine internal thought processes, and using this material to deduce principles and patterns that speak of his inner psyche. It might seem as if the reader or realiser of the text (intended in the widest possible sense) are creatively engaging with the elements in the construction site of another person’s text, but he/she is merely engaging with the elements that are potentially available, grouping them together in a meaningful way. It may at times seem as if the interpretation is far-fetched, but if it is motivated, in other words is implicitly in the text, and the argument can be supported through textual examples, it can carry an immense amount of meaning, and can figure as a hypothesis that represents reality and/or truth.
In the early philosophical work of Michel Foucault, he used this notion of “text” (intended in the widest possible sense, also as a description of the sum total of that which exists in a person’s framework of thought) to show that the author (writer or thinker, or then: logos) has intentions, and that these intentions can be read from the text, in a discursive manner. The original intention can be retrieved through searching for markers, often occurring in patterns, in this “text”. Foucault is not referring to explicit references, clear-cut stories, or cohesive, intentional communication, but rather pointing to surprising, almost coincidental finds within the text’s site of construction. Foucault’s consistent reference to “the being of language,” which is manifested by this hidden thought practice, is “emblematic of a nostalgia for metaphysics,” David Carroll argues in Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (p.15). In short: the text necessarily demonstrates, without being asked, the author’s characteristic nature and history, and his manifestation of the spiritual meaning of reality. If the Author is God, and the text is the Bible, it is so much more than mere nostalgia for the sake of metaphysics; it then becomes “a basement of thought, a mental infrastructure underlying all strands of knowledge” (Foucault, José Guilherme Merquior, p. 38) which contains the Characteristic Being, but also the history and blueprint (= future) of God, the Logos.
In a sense, this is what Foucault means with his seminal phrase: the archaeology of knowledge. A text is thus a “counter-memory” (originally one of Nietzsche’s concepts), “to recover what has been forgotten, to restore what has been lost, to perpetuate the presence or being of words” (https://archive.org/stream/michael-mahon-foucaults-nietzschean-genealogy-truth-power-and-the-subject/michael-mahon-foucaults-nietzschean-genealogy-truth-power-and-the-subject_djvu.txt, p. 183). That which can be gained or retrieved from the text, is an Image of the Author, and can help you and I to understand what the Origin of all things is.
In the theology of Islam, we find the concept of kalam, which literally means speech (or discourse). This academic discipline is founded on a central question: whether the Word of God, as they understand it, is contained in the Quran, and “can be considered part of God’s essence and therefore not created” (Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, pp. xvii–xviii). According to them discursivity is thus not an inherent characteristic of the knowability of “an all-encompassing Reason” (which Islam considers as Allah). Please note the similarity, in philosophic-theoretic terms, of what we call the Christian Logos.
Transposed to the Christian theology, the question becomes clear – is it possible to come to know God through his Word? In his book Spectacles (pp. 11-12), G. Spykman argues that the Word has a three-fold manifestation: Creation Word (in Genesis), the Word that became flesh (in Jesus), and the Word that became Scripture. If the answer to this is thus yes, it is clear that it should proceed through a discursive reading of this text, which in this case is the Bible itself. A traditional reading of the Bible will obviously bring about a multiplicity of readings, but they will not necessarily shed much light on the knowable Characteristic nature of God, and will not necessarily reveal his history and eternal plan. It especially means that our traditional understanding of the Bible does not provide enough of an understanding of what we fell out of (Rev. 2:5), or reveal the way we need to follow in order to return (John 14:5). Selah.
Through this it is clear why most theologians, and believers, alas cannot come to know God’s seed plot – as it is never presented as a cohesive whole, pericope, or portion of text. It needs to be read from the whole (“the whole Scripture” – 1 Tim. 3:16) through discursive text practices. This also presumes that through this practice of reading, the knowability of the Living God becomes possible. If one can pray in a wrong way (James 4:3), many of the ways we interpret Scripture is also necessarily wrong. One cannot merely argue the fact that something appears in Scripture, as there is always another Scripture that can be offered as counter. Word can contradict Word. A discursive reading of the Bible has certain reading principles that grounds its practice, and that circumvents the many discrepancies that tend to lead to meaningless arguments (John 6:52; Acts 17:18). God rightly asks: “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1 Cor. 1:20). This mystery of discursivity is certainly also a generative germ cell of the gospel of Christ.
But we would be amiss if our foray into theoretical and theological waters does not include the Jewish theological tradition. In Gal. 4:24 Paul explicitly uses the discursive reading style of typology when he is trying to explain something of the two covenants: “Now this may be interpreted allegorically …” (ESV). The Rotherham-translation presents it as follows: “Which things, indeed, may bear another meaning …”, and the 1534-Tyndale Bible: “Which thinges betoken mystery.” But the Complete Jewish Bible translates it most accurately as: “Now, to make a midrash on these things …”. Midrash is a Jewish tradition of discursive text exegesis that employ particular conditions of use (I’m drawing from dr. Moshe Simon-Shoshan -Yeshivat Har Etzion’s summary of rabbi Chazal’s approach, found at https://mizrachi.org/midrash/ for this outline):
- Omnisignificance means that every detail of a Biblical text carries meaning. Meaning needs to be assigned to every word, perhaps even every letter. The strange or unusual changes that are made to words need to be explained. Close reading is thus called for. The repetition of elements, stories, and expressions create landscapes of meaning that need to be detected.
- Gap filling refers to the necessary empty spaces in language. All narratives (stories), all poetry, all drama, the three main genres of literature, work with what Wolfgang Iser terms “spaces of indeterminacy”. A sparse writing style, or one that is compacted, or a type of overview, or that contains untold stories, elisions or metaphors, needs unpacking. It is however important that we do not engage in unmotivated hermeneutics. The text is a lattice or matrix where that which is not said often speaks louder than what is directly on the page.
- Dialogue between distant verses is about not working with a text’s immediate context. Although context is obviously always important as primary first level of communication, it is of great importance that we realise that subparts of the greater whole can communicate with one another across distance. Old and New Testament can thus be in a conversation, or identical expressions, parallel stories, etc. can generate force fields of meaning. Two specific reading strategies fall under this point:
- Resolving contradictory verses. There are many examples of texts in the Bible that seem contradictory – even in these instances we can find deeper-seated meaning. Many atheists will often present such anomalies as proof to try and discredit the Bible. The Bible is a book without any irregularity, thus that which is contradictory needs to be resolved within a greater/deeper/overarching context. The integration of conflicting texts brings new, exciting possibilities of meaning to the fore.
- Creating thematic or linguistic connections. In literature we refer to this as juxtaposition, and it brings to light a creative tension between seemingly unrelated parts. At times a golden thread can be seen through various events, but this asks that texts that are usually not brought into conversation are considered together, often with a repetitive given that gathers symbolic weight over time. This can include repetitive phrases, words, or forms.
This perspective should undoubtedly open the spiritual eyes of our readers, to notice how conventional wisdom closes the Biblical text, instead of opening it. According to Gen. 1:2 (AMP) –the “hovering, brooding” Spirit of God still glides across the living construction site.
- Selah: Try to find applications for some of the reading strategies outlined above.
- Read: 3-6; Phil. 1-4; Col. 1
- Memorise: 1:17 (how very apt!)
For a more in-depth understanding: Read one of the texts mentioned
