Jesus4u.co.uk - Literal and Literary Biblical Interpretation - Sermons

Date:: Sunday 20th July 2008
Year A, The Ninth Sunday after Trinity
Place:: Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
Service:: Evensong
Readings:: 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:16-2
Acts 4:1-2
Psalm 90

Perhaps the greatest paradox in the Anglo Saxon Biblical tradition is that between literature and literalism. Unlike Continental Reformers who constructed systematic theological Confessions, we only have the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion which are an unsystematic rag-bag of lazily convenient assertions, political expediency and demeaning polemic; instead we have formed our religion around two works, the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the bible, which are recognised as great literature.

Conversely, the literalist tradition is seen at its clearest in the introduction to the Articles of Religion where we are instructed that we must understand them in their "true, usual and literal" sense, in their "plain and full meaning" and in the "literal and grammatical" sense. This tradition has been re-affirmed recently in Clause 2. of GAFCON's Jerusalem Declaration (29.vi.08) which says of Scripture that it must be: "... translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the Church's consensual and historic reading". Let us simply note in passing the complexities of the words: "Canonical", "Historical" and "consensual" and concentrate on the word "plain".

By "great literature" we do not simply mean that which is beautiful in the way that a birthday cake, a lady's gown or a Victorian verse might be thought beautiful. At the very least, great literature is characterised by some of the following: deliberate ambiguity; multiple echoes of other works; operation at a variety of levels which can be understood separately or simultaneously; reliance upon adherence to and the deliberate breaking of rules and conventions; and a richness of depiction which is the converse of caricature. In other words, literature is required to fulfil criteria which are completely different from those required for clear, unambiguous text created to convey factual information, metadata and well defined structures and relationships.

I have drawn this paradox to our attention because the plain and literal meaning of the story of Solomon and the baby is inescapable. A good woman and a wicked woman confront Solomon who devises a not particularly subtle stratagem based on a widely recognised principle of human behaviour: if the baby is divided, and therefore killed, the real mother will have lost something precious and the impostor will have lost nothing.

However, if we look past the obvious, plain meaning of the text we should see that one of the central facts of the story tends to be overlooked by the context which forces our attention, as in a Renaissance painting, to one particular point, to the supposed wisdom of Solomon. The story makes no sense, however, without remembering that one woman had just lost her baby and was in a state of acute distress. She therefore calls not for our condemnation but for our compassion. Like all great literature, this story illustrates that we can see all three characters as multi-dimensional, acting from a variety of complex motives not necessarily dictated by forces in their control. Further, the authors and Redactors of the text also have their own motives.

Likewise, as great literature has timeless but nuanced 'relevance', our reaction to bereavement is bound to be different from that of a culture where more than half of its children died before the age of five. Scholarship might help us to understand the initial authorial intention but to be Christian we must take the second step of understanding what the text means for us; and as readers of Scripture we bring to it, in this case, whole histories and literatures about the meaning of wisdom, of motherhood and childhood, of bereavement and distress, of empathy and forgiveness; we have Freud, Jung and Laing and cannot imagine ourselves into a mental state where there is no conflict between surface and meaning.

The second reading, concerning one of the trials of Peter, is widely understood to have a very plain and straightforward meaning indeed: the Jewish religious leaders, who have crucified Jesus, are now trying to prevent the furtherance of his Mission; we are helped to this conclusion by the dramatic and literary parallels between this trial and the trial of Jesus. That understanding may well be theologically unassailable but it does not reflect the plain meaning of the text which is, rather, that the Jewish religious authorities, consonant with their duty, wished to preserve a "canonical", "historical" and "consensual" understanding of Judaism. In other words, they wished, in effect, to 'stop the clock' on theological development and if they needed to use their power to do this, to threaten, to excommunicate and even to kill, that is what they must do.

As their use of power to crush the mission of Jesus is so universally condemned by Christians, we must at least ask whether their literalist tradition alone is a truthful way of understanding Scripture; whatever the purposes of the Holy Spirit, she does not exist to allow Evangelical Christians to fall into the gross inconsistency for attacking Jewish literalism but asserting Christian literalism.

If we look at the two readings together, a neo-Marxist might argue that they are both about the use of power by conservatives to retain the class structure: the King in all his pomp imposes his decision on the two women; the Jewish elders in all their power have got it in for humble fishermen; in accepting some elements of this understanding we do not need to reject other and deeper meanings. The point is that our understanding of respectively of bereavement and the conflict between conservative and progressive theological forces can contribute to our interaction with the text but only after we have grasped its initial authorial intention. Thus we have a two-stage process:

In the first Reading, Solomon the wise designed a stratagem to determine the maternity of the baby which we might admire; but we need to understand the impact of bereavement on the pleading mother.
In the second Reading, the Jewish religious authorities which engineered the death of Jesus tried to prevent Peter and the Apostles from furthering his Mission; and, we must be careful of literalist theologians who 'stop the clock' at some arbitrary point.

We need to consider whether there is a credible point where exegetic and theological evolution must cease or whether they are, as Newman put it, organic. I should note in passing that the majority of attendees at the GAFCON Meeting in Jerusalem came from developing countries who, in framing their theology of literalism, seemed to forget that from the time that Christianity came into contact with black people up until the second half of the 20th Century, the Bible was cited in support of white racial superiority.

All this having been said, I deliberately chose today's Psalm as a counter balance to these rather self-referential preoccupations. The economist, John Maynard Keynes, when confronted with a proposed delay to social reform said: "In the long run we are all dead" and Psalm 90, as a great piece of literature, puts it at once more definitively and more poignantly. Being English, as opposed to being British or Celtic, we are all too apt to revert subconsciously to the most famous Englishman who ever lived; no, not Churchill or David Beckham but the heretic Pelagius who thought that we could attain salvation through our own merits. That tendency, reinforced by Horace's Exegi monumentum aere perennius, our wish to achieve something that survives us, is the posture of the politician not the supplicant. The Psalm tells us that no matter what we may think of what we do, it is nothing in the broad sweep of things.

What we do is hardly relevant but what we are is central. Today's Anthem from Haydn's Creation affirms the wonder of creation of which we are the pinnacle, radically separated, in spite of contemporary sentimentality about whales and badgers, from the animals, set apart as creatures created to choose to love.

Viewed in the context of the Psalm and the Anthem, our fractal, theological obsessions are put into their proper context; and yet, we must persevere. Any institution, in this case the Church of God, which tries to forge a bridge between the transcendent and the simply human must necessarily be committed to a search which will only end with time for metaphors to speak of God. In that search the complex and the beautiful are necessary complements to the simple and the literal.

Prayers: