The most significant problem related to sacred texts is how we will live in relation to them.
If I step back from that sentence I might observe it was written by a man, which curious species has the endearing habit of seeing the world in terms of problems to be solved, rather than by a woman, who might say something like, “Our duty towards the scriptures is to use their precepts and stories to nurture each other.
Or I might step back from that sentence and say, “You’re thinking in terms of stereotyped gender roles. Why not talk about sacred texts as gifts which allow us to organize our lives around sacred precepts?”
Fair enough, but once we say that it doesn’t take long to run into a significant problem. What do we do with troubling texts, like, “they had all things in common,” “renounce war and proclaim peace,” “judge not,” “take no thought for the morrow, what you shall eat or what you shall drink or wherewithal you shall be clothed,” “this Jesus whom ye slew,” “I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all,” or, “Eternal punishment is God’s punishment. Endless punishment is God’s punishment”?
Do we read them literaly, figuratively, metaphorically, as historical artifacts, or some other way?
I tend towards literal reading, but Gordon Thomasson reminded me one night more than 30 years ago in a long conversation outside the Paramount theater during which the last show let out and a worker changed the marquee that I don’t read the scriptures literally. I don’t stone adulterers, sacrifice animals at the temple, or hold all things in common. Nor do most Christians.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t believe early Christians did hold all things common. As I’ve thought about what I mean by literal it has to do with taking scriptures seriously as records of peoples’ experiences. But I also see scripture as profoundly figurative–not simply because it uses figures of speech extensively (some of my favorite being puns, polysyndeton, many ands, and polyptoton, repeating a word as as a different part of speech, “the mission with which I have commissioned you”) but also because events and figure and prefigure and postfigure each other.
One of my favorite questions to ask my Sunday School class is, “Do we know of anyone else who had this experience? Besides Jeremiah, who else was flung into the mirey pit?” I wasn’t thinking of Joseph sold into Egypt, but that was the first answer. Others included John the Baptist, Abinadi, Alma and Amulek, and Joseph Smith.
People often have the same experiences as people who lived before and we can see those experiences as figurative of each other. Or others can see them as figurative even if we’re not aware of enacting a figurative or archetypal experience.
It is obvious, reading Spencer W. Kimball’s account of his trek up the mountain after his cousin J. Reuben Clark phoned to tell him he had been called to fill the vacancy in the Twelve, that he had an archetypal experience similar to the Savior being driven into the wilderness or Moses being called up the mountain. But when he recognized the similarity to the Savior’s experience he dismissed the thought as unworthy, even blasphemous.
Another way of thinking about literal language is to insist on reading the words of scripture in their plain sense, and only in that sense.
Consider the passage we ended with last month.
Eternal punishment is God’s punishment.
Endless punishment is God’s punishment.
That’s a stark set of statements. I remember reading a comment from Bruce R. McConkie to the effect that since God is Endless the name of his punishment is Endless punishment, and whoever endures God’s punishment endures endless punishment whether it lasts a minute a day or a year. (I don’t know the source, sorry.) I thought it was an interesting attempt to get around a troublesome passage. Then one day I read the passage in context and was struck by verses 6 and 7:
4 And surely every man must repent or suffer, for I, God, am endless.
5 Wherefore, I revoke not the judgments which I shall pass, but woes shall go forth, weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, yea, to those who are found on my left hand.
6 Nevertheless, it is not written that there shall be no end to this torment, but it is written endless torment.
7 Again, it is written eternal damnation; wherefore it is more express than other scriptures, that it might work upon the hearts of the children of men, altogether for my name’s glory.
8 Wherefore, I will explain unto you this mystery, for it is meet unto you to know even as mine apostles.
9 I speak unto you that are chosen in this thing, even as one, that you may enter into my rest.
10 For, behold, the mystery of godliness, how great is it! For, behold, I am endless, and the punishment which is given from my hand is endless punishment, for Endless is my name. Wherefore—
11 Eternal punishment is God’s punishment.
12 Endless punishment is God’s punishment.
Verses 6 and 7 turn the plain sense of 11-12 on its head and provide a lot of hope that the promise of eternal punishment is not so dire as it seems. They also function as an invitation to consider that words don’t always work according to their plain sense, that we need to remember that any word or phrase has multiple meanings, and reaching after those meanings is a a natural part of our reading and study and devotion.
Because words and groups of words have multiple meanings a plain sense to one person may not be plain to another. That’s part of what makes interpreting the plain sense as the only sense so unappealing to me, indeed even a bit threatening if people start bludgeoning each other with their scriptural understandings. And yet the tradition of interpreting scripture in a certain way and that way only is so strong even a careful, insightful, perceptive scholar can get trapped inside it.
A minor example I came across this morning. In Willis Barnsstone’s translation The New Covenant Vol 1, he glosses Loukas 21:16b “and they will put some of you to death” as a prophecy about
“Stephen in Acts 7.54-60 and James in Acts 12.2. Yeshua’s prophecies, here and throughout the scriptures, indicate that the author of Luke created these words for Yeshua since Stephen’s death took place after his crucifixion. All knowledge by Yeshua, including the destruction of Jerusalem elaborated in Luke 19.41-44 and 21.20-24, suggeste seither that Yeshua had knowledge of the future or that in the future the assemblers of the scriptures put knowledge of the future into Yeshua’s speech.” (Note 254, page 286).
This passage gives Barnstone an opportunity to lay out a principle of biblical scholarship–that any prophecy dates the passage as being written after the prophecy, but the passage is sufficiently general that even if you doubt Yeshua’s knowledge of the future his words needn’t be seen as a retroactive prophecy of Stephen’s and James’s deaths specifically. It’s reasonable for a charismatic leader facing his own murder to predict that his followers may bring persecution and martyrdom upon themselves.
A more important example comes in the way Barnstone assigns any favorable reference to Rome as “the voice of Rome,” as Roman appropriation of the scriptures or Christian attempts to mollify Rome. He’s so focused on reclaiming Yeshua as a Jewish rabbi crucified by Romans that he accepts Pilate’s self-exoneration in Mark 15:11-5 and Matthew 27:24 as the writers’ exoneration, the turn towards Rome of the later church as the original intent of the story of Pilate in the Gospels.
In contrast, one of the commentators in The Jewish Annotated New Testament points out that no one–from the Jewish leaders who have to search for false witnesses, to Pilate, to the Roman soldier who says, “Truly this was the Son of God”–proclaims Jesus as anything but innocent.
If there’s a polemical edge to the Gospels, I suspect that’s the edge: Jesus was innocent.
I suspect the Gospels were not originally anti-Roman or anti-Jewish, but for Christians they became anti-Jewish. What I want to explore in upcoming posts is how passages that demonstrate what the Jewish Annotated New Testament calls “the exaggerated language of debate of the first century” (xi), debate within a culture, came to be interpreted as war between cultures.
Your turn.
Pondering on your use of the term “literal,” it seems to me that a good proxy for the notion of literal interpretation is interpretation that doesn’t have to go outside the text in order to determine meaning. It is, in short, decontextualized language. And yet I’m enough of a rhetorical critic (not much of one, but enough) to be suspicious of the notion of *any* kind of interpretation outside the context of an interpretive community (e.g., Stanley Fish) — not least because in actual practice no texts are ever produced or interpreted outside such a context, nor does anyone intend them to be. The notion of a fixed meaning that is embedded within a text is a perversion — as if adding “of God” is enough to make scriptures no longer “words” in the normative sense.
There’s a lot of support in the scriptures for a reading of scripture as necessarily part of an interpretive context (“No man knoweth the things of God but by the Spirit of God”). And yet that path tends to make us nervous. And rightly so. It’s easy enough to interpret scriptures out of meaning anything truly challenging to us personally. (I’m reminded of something I once heard from Marvin J. Ashton: “If the shoe fits, let it pinch.” But we’d rather force the shoe out of shape.)
Increasingly, I suspect that our desire to have language be less complicated than it is — straightforward meanings and the like — is rooted in a desire for existence to be less challenging than it is. At the same time, I’m reminded of (and cautioned by) the observation by the late Elder Packer that academics are often more fond of questions than answers. “If the shoe fits…”