Colin Greene has written a response to my review of Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination. It has been published on the Metavista blog, but I have been given permission to republish it here, for which I am very grateful.
Colin Greene has written a response to my review of Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination. It has been published on the Metavista blog, but I have been given permission to republish it here, for which I am very grateful.
A response to Andrew Perriman by Colin Greene
I am very grateful to Andrew Perriman for taking the interest and the time to engage thoughtfully, sympathetically and critically with our book Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination. Andrew’s empathy comes, I think, from a genuine realization that the book really does endeavour to chart the new territory of colliding cultural narratives that we are now experiencing, nevertheless his criticism is directed particularly toward me because he feels that in the second part of the book I do not do sufficient justice to the historicity of the biblical narratives. The difficulty of adjudicating on issues such as what we mean by the historical particularity and reliability of the biblical narratives I have written about elsewhere but the point that Andrew makes is a fair one and needs to be taken seriously. So let me engage Andrew on the range of critical issues that he brings out in his review
1. A realistic narrative
Andrew is intrigued by the fact that in the second part of the book I try to revisit a number of hermeneutical presuppositions that both Eric Auerbach
Eric Auerback, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature; Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative
and Hans Frei claimed formed the dominant method of exegesis practiced by the teachers and exegetes of the church from the 2nd century until the arrival of the historical critical method in the middle of the 18th century. Auerbach observed that the Bible, as indeed was true he claimed, of Dante’s Inferno and many 19th century novels, was best understood as a realistic narrative. This entailed that the Bible had to be read in a literal and figurative sense as a history-like grand narrative that recounts the story of God’s specific purposes in creating, preserving and governing the world as we know it. Such a procedure necessarily entailed a number of exegetical presuppositions.
First of all, we must accept that the real world was the world the Bible described, a world that mixed together ordinary mundane human affairs and events with extraordinary divine coincidences and visitations. This was a world where God walks and talks with Adam in the garden; where he speaks to Moses from a burning bush that is not consumed; where he visits numerous plagues upon a recalcitrant Egyptian pharaoh; where it is prudent to practice hospitality because we may inadvertently be playing host to angels and other such divine messengers and where God the creator of the cosmos sends his own Son into the world to defeat evil and complete his saving purposes for all humankind.
Secondly, we have to realise that the biblical writers and subsequent Christian interpreters were not that interested in the question that we became obsessed with from the middle of the 18th century onwards, namely, did these events really take place in history as they are described? Rather the biblical writers endeavoured simply to preserve the realistic intent of the whole story as a plot with real characters who acted according to real human motives and desires and who therefore were part of a real divine/human drama that will ultimately decide the fate of the whole cosmos.
Thirdly, to preserve this realistic narrative shape and to maintain the unity of the whole story, Frie notes that the biblical writers use a technique he calls ‘figuration’. In other words they factor in events that took place previously in the story as types or pre-figurations of events that happen subsequently. So for instance the temptation narratives deliberately re-figure Jesus’ 40 day sojourn in the wilderness as a parallel to Israel’s 40 year experience of wilderness wanderings after the Exodus from Egypt. This allows the gospel writers to describe Jesus as a type or a re-figuration of Moses. So like Moses Jesus can be understood as a great prophet leading the new configuration of the twelve tribes of Israel out of captivity to old ways of thinking and believing into the new life of the Kingdom. This is a figural depiction of new events along the lines of similar or parallel patterns from Israel’s previous history. As such this hermeneutical procedure preserves the unity and cohesion of the whole biblical drama.
Fourthly, once we accept the realistic intentionality of this unified divine/human drama we must not try and press the biblical world into our socially constructed worldview be it modern, postmodern or whatever, rather we must proceed the other way round and allow the biblical world to have precedence. As an addition to the thinking of Auerbach and Frei in this regard, I claim that we can only do this if we recognise that the biblical story is an eschatological story that is as yet unfinished. Indeed the four central parts of the overall drama, the creation narratives, the story of Israel, the coming of Jesus and the establishment of the church are still reaching toward their fulfilment in the coming of the Kingdom of God. As such they are still unfinished parts of the story that can reach out and incorporate our specific historical and cultural world into the grand designs and intentions of the one central narrative. Once we accept this fact then we will find ourselves, to use my phrase, ‘dwelling in the story’. We will see that the biblical world reaches out, as Andrew puts it, to assimilate extra – biblical stories within the biblical narrative. This whole hermeneutical procedure Andrew views as problematic for two main reasons.
2. Positioning the text
First of all he believes that the more we realize that the biblical narrative recounts a particular historical and socio- political contextualized story the more difficult it is for later generations to connect with it because the historical and cultural situations of later generations are so very different from that of the Bible. Secondly he queries the way I try to deal with this issue which, as I have described above, necessarily demands that we relativize the ascendency of the historical critical approach to the Bible and make room for more literary methods that take us back to how the Bible was viewed and utilized in the previous history of the church.
Let me say quite clearly that this does not mean that I want to forfeit the obvious gains the historical critical method has won for us, nor do I think that we should give up taking a real historical interest in the world behind the text. What I do want to relinquish is the dogma that asserts that the historical critical appropriation of the biblical traditions is the only appropriate way to approach the Bible. Rather I want to give equal weight to the world within the text, which, as Walter Brueggemann and Philis Trible recognize, means asking questions such as what rhetorical purpose does the text actually serve? In other words we must accept, as the speech act philosophers do, that human beings do a variety of things with words and any form of ancient literature needs to be examined for evidence of such rhetorical purposes and intentions. Finally I also want to acknowledge with Paul Ricoeur the fundamental importance of the world in front of the text – so for instance, I want to ask questions such as how can the biblical account of the exodus or the exile actually address and bring meaning to the world with which we are presently involved? In both regards Andrew believes that I am in danger of elevating the notion of historical continuity at the expense of historical particularity.
My repost is to say that Andrew’s criticism is only valid if we operate with what I would call a closed view of history. This entails that we think of history as a closed nexus of cause and effect where one thing happens that effects or causes something else and after awhile all these complex events get lost in the mists of the past as time moves on and so they become increasingly difficult both to fully understand and to re-appropriate for another time and place. I don’t actually think, however, that this is the way history works. Most certainly I believe it is important to respect that real events happen in history and we must take their social location and cultural particularity very seriously, something all the gospel writers do in their own way, but I do not think that the meaning of any historical event is just limited to a particular historical time and place. We all live within the space time continuum of past, present and future and within that continuum we try our best to understand and re-appropriate the interpretation and meaning of past events. But we can only do so on the presupposition that such meaning does in fact transcend or rise beyond the original social and cultural context out of which these events emerged. On that basis we can think of an interpretative history or a kind of hermeneutical bridge across which past events travel to impact or collide with our situation in the present. The result is that a new horizon of meaning emerges which combines the significance of past events with the contribution added to these events by other past readers and interpreters plus, of course, the contribution our own particular cultural history brings to how we read and interpret the biblical narrative in our time. To put it simply the meaning of the past is not lost in the past but confronts us in the present as the text comes alive again in our particular context.
3. An unfolding story
Rather than think of an unfolding story and narrative such as I have described, Andrew asserts that what allows for historical continuity between past interpreters of the Bible and those of us doing so in the present, is the fact that the church is the community of believers who are united through time as the communion of saints. This is a particular move that other narrative theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, for instance, have made that I think only avoids the issues rather than addressing the genuine concerns Andrew raises. We cannot just translate the problem of how we can still appropriate and indwell the biblical narrative into an argument about being part of the community of believers. To my mind it is much more plausible to think of history as an eschatological reality whereby past events reach out in anticipation of their future fulfilment in the unity of history. In so doing such events create new horizons of meaning in the present as we seek to appropriate their significance for our situation today.
Let me try and provide an illustration of my argument. In my view the very best book about the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 is Philip Gourevitch’s, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: stories from Rwanda. In reading the book Gourevitch describes the historical events and the interpretive context that preceded the massacres. So for instance he gives due weight to the long history of Tutsi and Hutu antipathy as well as the cultural and anthropological differences between both tribes. He clearly isolates the political corruption and culpability of the Habyarimana regime and the sinister manipulation of the situation by the Hutu controlled media. He also reports the obvious complicity of the European and American administrations that literally turned a blind eye to the genocide and so allowed a barbarous situation to get completely out of hand. But even when all these factors are added up and explained – the actual meaning of genocide - why a particular people group would choose to massacre and eliminate a million people from another tribe finally eludes us. That is because such catastrophic events simply do not yield their full meaning to historical analysis. Instead such events defy historical description because their true meaning and intent awaits further explication. The genocide in Rwanda can only be a meaningful event if in the present and the future Tutsis and Hutus’ are successful in rebuilding their communities and their country. Without such a new and wider horizon of meaning the genocide will remain an ultimately inexplicable account of the demonic force of human hatred and barbarism.
Dr Colin J.D. Greene
