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the bare naked words and layzie bone
Something is happening. After centuries wrestling with the “doctrine of biblical inspiration” believers have worked themselves into an exhausted lethargy about this book. We’ve been so busy either debunking or defending it, that we’ve forgotten to simply enter it on it’s own terms to know what punch it packs. But what I see happening is a growing body of people who have no dog in that old fight. They don’t approach the Bible with any pre-conceived notions about its inspiration or lack thereof. They could care less about words like inerrancy or form criticism. They may be completely uninformed about the Jesus seminar and reactions to it. They are outside the camp of insitutional religion, but not outside the reach of Jesus. They are simply readers without rubrics, responding to the text as it is given to them and they are as disparate a group as Reynolds Price, the novelist, Leon Kass, the bio-ethicist at University of Chicago and Layzie Bone, the rapper.
The Price of Admission
I’m telling you, the best introduction to the gospels I’ve ever read is by Reynolds Price in his Three Gospels. Rice, so far as I know, doesn’t attend any church or claim to be an “orthodox Christian.” He is, by public disclosure, gay. And he is one of America’s most accomplished novelists. This is a man who has approached the gospels as a bare naked book. He has apparently paid the price of admission that every person of letters knows is required to see what a story has to deliver: the willing suspension of disbelief. He describes in his introduction a visionary experience of Jesus whereby he, Reynolds Price, was healed of, or was given extraordinary grace to bear–it’s not clear–the residual pain of spinal cancer.
The Beginning of Wisdom
Leon Kass, is a bio-ethicist at the University of Chicago. He has written what I am finding to be the most inspired and insightful reading of Genesis I’ve ever encountered, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. This book begins with his words: “How does a man of medicine and science, raised in a strictly secular home without contact with Scripture, come to write a book about the Bible?….It was all because of Darwin.”
Last but not least, Lee Cantelon, and friends of his like Layzie Bone, and the Wordz Project. Lee Cantelon is a music producer and a Jesus lover. He compiled the words of Jesus of Nazareth into a book to make his words available to those without any religious commitments, per se. People that Lee knew as friends in his industry. People who wouldn’t go to church and might not be welcome if they did. He gave his manuscript to some of his friends and asked them to respond with songs if they were so moved. They were so moved.
Rickie Lee Jones & Layzie Bone
Rickie Lee Jones burst out with a CD called Sermon on Exposition Boulevard. Oh, man, listen to this. This is a woman who, like Mary Magdalene, brought her brokenness to the doorstep of Jesus where she heard his words. Her music echoes what she heard there. Haunting, evocative, brutally honest, searingly beautiful songs.
The biggest names in rap are lining up to read the words and sing what the words evoke in them. Funny thing is, I don’t know who these guys are because I’m a music idiot. Ask someone who is not a music idiot, though to tell you about Layzie Bone, for starters. Who wrote and recorded The Blessings after reading the Beatitudes of Jesus.
Other artists in the project include Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun, founding members of The Last Poets, recoding, Is He the Living God? in response to the words.
The bare naked words, that is.
Power of the Bare Naked Words
What happens when people outside the camp read the bare naked words? They come into contact with something or someone. That is, if they know how to pay the price of admission for any words. To enter them and see what they have to offer. These word merchants know that all it takes is the willing suspension of disbelief. It doesn’t mater what they believe about the Bible to be, per se. They don’t hold or care about holding the doctrines of the bible defenders or the doctrines of the bible debunkers. They just know how to listen to a song, or watch a movie, or read a book.
They know what these things demand to yield what they’ve got: the willing suspension of disbelief. What you do every time you plunk yourself in front of the TV to watch CSI. You don’t say to yourself, “The lighting in these forensic labs isn’t as dark as they show it!” You don’t say, “Man, the flirting that goes on here would be sexual harassment in my office!” No, you need a break from the story you’ve been telling yourself all day. And you want to hear from someone else for a change.
Maybe we should learn a thing or two about the power of the bare naked words from the people taking in the bare naked words outside the camp.
Tags: bible, bible debunkers, bible defenders, genesis, gospels, layzie bone, leon kass, reynolds price, rickie lee jones, the dead poets, wordz project
October 21st, 2008 at 3:55 pm
What I like about this blog is that people buzz into it like flies into fly paper. I love to see them struggle.
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 am
I can relate to this in my choice of music. Often I’m attracted to music purly by the way it interacts with my brain, releasing copeous amounts of endorphins. For some it’s the words that move them, others it’s the way words are delivered.
Also when it comes to the vast spiritual battles people have about how t’s are crossed and how many i’s should or should not be dotted, I tend to not care much either way. All that stuff is ancelary to the point! What is the point? That my friend is up to you.
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Willis, I think you are being a tad immature.
What I like about this particular post is that there are no apparent requirements. No apparent preconditions. No right way or wrong way. For a person to be changed by God’s Word. For a person to be stopped and reordered by the words and the stories and the characters in the Bible.
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I think one of the worst things that ever happened to the Bible (other than the Study Bible) was when they put in the chapter and verse references, sometime in the middle ages. Instead of having to actually understand and paraphrase the Bible you can just throw out chapter and verse citations, like it’s all a legal document. How lame would it have been if, rather than “It is written: ‘People do not live on bread alone’”, Jesus had said, “Deuteronomy 8:3 says, ‘people do not live on bread alone’” I don’t know, just gives a whole different vibe. This is why I love to *listen* to the Bible on my iPod. Somehow listening to it, rather than reading it, immerses you in a way that gets beyond the words themselves and into contact with the speaker/writer. To me it’s the difference between getting an email from someone and getting a voicemail. Somehow the words on the computer screen are so cold, so harsh, so definite–so easy to misunderstand. A person’s voice is so fluid, so nuanced, so warm (or at least most of the time). My favorite Bible audio is “The Listener’s Bible NIV: The Complete Bible, Genesis to Revelation” performed by Max McLean. Get it at http://www.audible.com. I know some people don’t like it because he can be a bit dramatic in the reading… but to me, that’s the point–it’s not conversation with your friend, it’s listening to a great storyteller. I especially love the way Max reads Genesis 1. If you don’t like that, the TNIV Audio Bible is excellent also. One thing I would stay away from is the cheap-o dramatized versions. I had one copy of the NIV on CD that was just awful… they used the same sound effects over and over, the voices were awful; very lame. But, when it comes to listening to the Bible on audio, I have to recommend starting with “The Book of God” on audio, written and narrated by Walter Wangerin Jr. It’s not a translation of the Bible, but rather the Bible told as a novel–a series of stories all woven together. Absolutely fantastic for anyone wanting to get a grasp of the overall story without getting lost in the details. And I do recommend listening to it rather than reading it. Either way is good, but this guy is a master storyteller, and you have to hear the way he tells it.
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:46 pm
I like this exchange between Reynolds Price and Ray Suarez (from NewsHour, in 2003).
RAY SUAREZ: Yet you call yourself an outlaw Christian.
REYNOLDS PRICE: I’m an outlaw Christian.
RAY SUAREZ: What does that mean?
REYNOLDS PRICE: In all sorts of senses. I’m an outlaw Christian in the first sense that I don’t belong to a particular church. I was reared in a Protestant church and I really stopped going to church when I was about 21, 22 years old, and realized that I had been in the church all my life and had never heard one single word said against racism. That was in the mid-1950s. And that was, in fact, the truth.
Since then, as I’ve watched the church and wished it well certainly, I’ve watched it essentially fail to deal adequately with the main moral issues of our times. First of all racism; the status of women in worship and in the human community, now homosexuality, which is a situation that affects a great many human beings; and a number of other failures that I could recount.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:09 am
I can relate well to Reynolds Price when thinking about the church I attended back in Cali.. I’ll never forget the good old days in the College Group when someone asked for a show of hands from those who would be voting for Al Gore. I shot my hand up with gusto when suddenly the room fell silent with some slight gasps and girls with hands covering their mouths. I had only been there for a few weeks. I actually stayed there for 7 years, but never became a member. I love Jesus, but I wasn’t going to sell my soul to the church of republicanism. I actually thought I could have a different political view and be accepted in that christian community. Acceptance unfortunately was only at arms length. I became an “outlaw” in my church. It was kind of fun actually, but I usually got pissed off on Sunday mornings and began to suffer some long term effects and resentments. 7 years and I only keep in touch with one person from that church.
October 25th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Something Don says above about paraphrase. At the beginning of his first post. That paraphrase of the Bible somehow is okay. Is legitimate. Don, I think you don’t really understand how to read that document, if you think it’s okay to paraphrase it. Paraphrase is approximate. It’s always approximate. And it’s specifically approximate in the direction of the paraphraser’s biases. So a paraphrase pretends equivalence, synonymy, when in fact it is distortion, interpretation. Paraphrase is a rewriting of the Bible in the paraphraser’s own sensibility. Paraphrase is usually dishonest. It is what people who pretend to teach the Bible do. They don’t teach the Bible, when they paraphrase. They teach their rewriting of the Bible.
October 25th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
What paraphrase is, is an attempt to perfect the Bible. Just as theology is an attempt to perfect God.
October 28th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Paraphrasing, printing words on paper, binding into book format… these are all “attempts to ‘perfect’ the Bible”, or maybe a better way to put it: These things are necessary in order for the truth of the Bible to reach humanity in an intelligible way.
If all paraphrasing is distortion and illegitimate, then so is translation and we should therefore not even read the Bible unless we learn Hebrew and Greek. And even then we shouldn’t attempt to actually understand the Bible because of all of those inherent biases withing each of our heads, in the path between our eyes and our cerebral cortices.
Willis, I wonder if you could explain to us how to properly read “that document”. How do YOU do it?