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modernist, literalist, actualist: a third way of reading the words
Phyllis Tickle, in her latest and greatest, The Words of Jesus, writes in the introduction about an “actualist” reading of the canonical gospels. Typical Tickle: lay it out and let the readers make sense of it themselves. Or perhaps lay it out as if she needs the readers’ help figuring out what she’s written. Well it hit me like a ton of basement block and I’ve been trying to make sense of it ever since. Not a “modernist” reading of the words. Not a “literalist” reading of the words. But an “actualist” reading of the words.
Working, working, working. What’s that mean? I think of it like this: for the past hundred years or so we’ve been faced with a choice between two readings. The “modernist” reading of Scripture, which places us outside of the words to deconstruct them with the tools of modern scholarship, like form criticism. Most of the time, the modernist reading leads to a kind of disillusion that leaves nothing to believe in. In reaction to this, many, understandably and for the noblest of reasons, assert the “literalist” reading. Rather than standing outside the words to debunk them, faithfulness means standing outside the words to defend them against modernist attacks.
With all the bristling in, among, and between these camps, no wonder the non-combatants–those poor souls who don’t have a dog in this fight–have kept their distance from these words.
But what if there is another approach? An approach that goes beyond the modernist and the literalist. An approach that doesn’t replace what these have to offer so much as takes a step beyond where they bring us. For lack of a better word, let’s call it actualist: an actualist reading of the words. A reading that invites us to shift perspective from the outside to the inside, of the words that is. Where his words abide in us and we abide in his words. Where we lay down the fools errand of mastery (you search the Scriptures thinking that by them you have eternal life) and we enter the words themselves, or let them enter us (yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.)
This morning it happened. I’m doing my morning prayers from The Divine Hours and the words of Jesus meet me there. I like the NIV better than the Jerusalem Bible so I’ll quote it in NIV: “While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. When the teachers of the Law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said to them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’” (Mark 2: 15-16)
I stop dead in my tracks. Stop in my time tracks that is, where this happened 2,000 years ago and I’m at a bi-millennial remove. And slowly, like something coming into focus, only the focus mechanism isn’t concerned about a three-dimensional, so much as a fourth-dimensional distance, I’m there. Or rather, I’m present to the thing happening. I’m where the words came from, that is. Which is the actual thing itself. Jesus, with his disciples at table along with many followers who were tax collectors and sinners. Still.
Yesterday, I got my first New Scientist magazine, the August 16-22 2008 issue. And I read a little article titled, “For your brain, it’s as good as being there.” It’s a study of the reading brain. When you read about something happening in a book, the part of the brain that registers actual experience while you are in it fires. Did you catch that? You actually taste something disgusting like quinine and your brain registers the disgust in a certain part of the brain. Then you read a story about something disgusting and your brain registers the disgust in the same place that it actually happened with the quinine on your tongue. As though the reading produces the actual experience of the thing itself.
Things happen out in the world. But our experience of things happening out in the world happens in that part of the “out in the world” called our brains, where only we can experience it. And perhaps God, whose Spirit alone, we understand, knows the mind of God and ours with equal clarity.
This morning, that’s what was happening. Through the power of the words, as I slipped into them, or let them slip into me, having moved beyond the task of either deconstructing or defending them, a task many others have already lent many long hours and lifetimes of labor to; the part of me that experiences what I’m part of happening, actually experienced what the words were inviting me into: Jesus, with his disciples at table with many tax collectors and sinners who were also followers. I hope you were able to follow that sentence, because it was something, actually something, as it was happening. Experiencing the actual tension around that table. My own because it was begging so many questions. And the tension from those who thought it was so awful. And the yearning, want-to-lean-closer-if-possible of the sinner followers. Knowing that to have dinner with him meant the willingness to sit at the table with them (whether “them” were the disciples or the many tax collectors and sinners following.)
And now I’m wondering, are these words inviting me into a kind of camera with a lens that is able to focus through the distance of time, so as to effectively remove it’s distance?
Or back to an earlier metaphor: I would like, more and more, to leave the battlefield of the combatants behind and enter these words or let them enter me and see what they and I will actually do with each other.
Can anyone help me explain what I actually said?
Tags: actualist, beyond liberal-conservative, lectio divina, phyllis tickle, prayer, the words of Jesus
August 22nd, 2008 at 2:19 pm
i can’t really figure out what you’re saying here–not quite. it sounds like a lot like “use your imagination,” or “read the bible like you would any good piece of fiction.” its what you do when you read any good book–let it take you to another time/place/setting. that’s great for reading the adventures of huckleberry finn, but not so great when you have to actually make sense of what jesus and paul meant, or how we’re to make use of it in the world today. or what to do when people say the opposite things about what jesus meant (like they do today about war, homosexuality, women, money, etc.) thank god the apostolic fathers didn’t adopt this so-called “actualist” mumbo-jumbo. hey, in my imagination jesus is gay. in my friend’s imagination jesus is a fundamentalist. guess it all depends on how you’re wired!
August 22nd, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Its simpler than “using your imagination”. Our brains are a very complicated thing — so complicated that only God understands them and its only because He made them so wonderfully that we stand a chance of understanding anything at all about them ourselves (is that circular?
On a purely physical level, the part of our brain that processes a “real” experience is the *same* part of our brain that processes a written account of an experience. I don’t actually have to *do* anything, it happens no matter what, there’s no thought involved at all. I can train myself (or be trained) to respond differently because another wonderful, if sometimes frustrating, facet of our brains is the highly developed frontal area — the part that is our “thinking, rational” part. But over-riding my conscious knowledge of a physical event doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. What an amazing gift God has given us then, if we can get our frontal lobe out of the way — He inspired men to write His story, His love letters to us, and then He gave us the ability to experience Him in such an intimate way!
I am rational and logical to a fault and I do mean a fault. But even as I have a God-given intellect and ability to use my reason and knowledge (to His glory and for Him to sanctify me), like anything, I’m not perfect at using it the way He’d like. This is very exciting to me, because sometimes I need to get out of the way and just BE with Him and I don’t know how. To know that I already am….I just haven’t realized it….that’s wonderful news.
August 22nd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Jake, Hmmm. I think we should give more to our reading of God’s word than we give to our reading of Huck Finn, but we shouldn’t give less. ken
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:38 pm
So the ironic thing is that the literalist is really a modernist in as much as they adopt the modern perspective that man, though he be finite, can none the less grasp a truly objective perspective on a text.
I see nothing unorthodox about your approach of using your mind to imagine you are there with Jesus and thereby engage your emotions, all under girded by the power of the Holy Spirit. St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits was a big proponent of this type of meditation.
Still, I don’t think you can give up the task of studying the Word and the context in which it was originally written.
Did your understanding of who a tax collector was in Jesus time have a bearing on your experience? Does it matter whether or not you realize that a “sinner” is not someone who “sins” in the way we typically think of it, but rather someone too poor to fulfill the obligations (such as buying the right sacrificial animal) that the religious elite imposed on people in order for them to be “righteous”?
August 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 am
“Actualist.” Hmm. Well I suppose scholars need a name for it.
Some of my most wonderful interactions with Scripture have come through a process of putting myself into the scene and looking around. I’ve noticed details I didn’t see before. I’ve been struck by the impact of a word or action that I’d missed before. I’ve been humbled and led to repentance by realizing that I am more like the villain than the hero… I’ve wished I could paint, so I could capture some of the things I’ve seen and show them to someone else without the deterioration of words.
And yes, I have absolutely been helped by learning about the history, sociology, geography, etc. And yes, I have been helped by the discipline of refusing to mess with what was written, even taking the time to use my laymen’s textbooks on the Greek and Hebrew to try and solve the puzzles.
But this book isn’t like Huckleberry Finn, which is delightful and thought provoking and valuable but can never mean more than Twain intended to say. Nor can Twain respond to our anachronistic deconstructions, because he’s dead. But the Scriptures are alive and active, and they talk back, because the one who is speaking is not dead.
So if we allow ourselves to be present to the narrator—putting aside to the best of our ability any personal agendas, fears or preconceptions (and he is well able to handle any we miss)—why should we be surprised by genuine revelatory experiences? He is invested in our ‘getting it,’ after all.
August 24th, 2008 at 4:33 am
Or, like the act of communion, the restriction of time is removed in such a way that it is a past now…again.
Heb. 13:8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
1Cor. 11:23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
August 24th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
i have no problem with using one’s imagination, or appreciating the bible as a work of good literature, or whatnot. those are all great. not my point. my issue was with this idea that somehow the scholars and the literalists have it wrong and now we have some “new” way to read scripture that’s better. they’re somehow standing “outside” the text, whereas tickle and ken are “inside”. we wouldn’t know nearly as much about our bible as we do now were it not for the scholars using tools such as form, literary, historical… criticism. and when you have spong and crossan tearing the historical account to shreds, i’m glad someone stands up for literal meaning (even though i don’t always agree). somehow ken would have us go back to dark ages naivete and immerse ourselves in the text with simply our imagination as the tool of interpretation. sounds fun, but no substitute for study.
August 25th, 2008 at 4:08 am
maybe instead of the blood/brain barrier, we have the bible/brain barrier, which is passed through with the word/witness transmitter…all kidding aside, i think research and brain-science has caught up to seek to explain how the Word shapes us, by setting or re-setting things “in our inward person” through word/witness experiences…this has to be a pillar of discipleship (and has been for centuries)
August 25th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Jake, I think Ken was simply saying that the modernist and literalist approaches only get you so far. Not that they aren’t needed and useful. The problem is people not getting beyond that debate to an appreciation for the text itself, as a reader.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I like what Metler said about communion—yesterday to today–there’s nothing new under the sun. Sometimes I imagine Jesus hanging out with me and my extended family and friends. Talking about an “actualist’s” view of Jesus hanging out with sinners, et al. It’s all about the construct of belonging vs. behaving. The Pharisees struggled with that. They wanted Jesus’ attention so bad; they didn’t know how to connect with him. Sometimes, we’re no different.
BTW Ken-Kudos for being footnoted by PT. Lucky Duck.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Maybe a little off topic (which woudln’t be the first time), but my struggle is with the inter-changeable use of the term “Word” or “Word of God” with the the term Bible and Scriptures. I think the scriptures/bible is a written expression of the Word, in as much as Jesus is a human expression of God.
John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning.”
Does anyone find it strange that Paul’s references to the word of God, are now included in the bible which is often considered the word of God?
Would I be cast out of the church if I had the audacity to make a claim that the bible won’t last for eternity? To be clear, I do believe the Word will be with us for eternity…
Maybe it’s just me who is a little confused….any scholars out there able to set a poor boy straight?
September 6th, 2008 at 4:54 am
I couldn’t help but to ask again for some clarity on the question I asked in the last comment after just reading the Preface to a book a friend sent to me called “Heaven”. The author begins by saying “We Christians who believe God’s Word are partly to blame for this. Why? We have failed to explore and explain the Bible’s magnificent teachings about Heaven…I want to make it clear that it’s vitally important that this book be true to Scripture.”
So in a few sentences the author seemingly uses the terms God’s Word, Bible and Scripture interchangeably. How can this be? I cannot articulate my confusion in less than a few paragraphs, so I will keep it at my original comment from above. I don’t have this figured out in any way….I just would like some insight on how these words fit together, if at all.
November 25th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I have just enjoyed listening to hours of Phyllis Tickle on “The Great Emergence” at http://www.seabury.edu/ She was a benefit to me to understand why liberal and postliberal theology is on a rapid rise in the West. But would you say it is fair — to say that she would not agree with the Vineyard Statement on Scripture – http://www.vineyardusa.org/site/files/about/statement-of-faith.pdf