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‘But Jesus Didn’t Say…’
All of Scripture speaks to Jesus’ message.
Image: lubrico / Flickr
Remember
the old bumper sticker that proclaimed, “God says it. I believe it.
That settles it.”? An updated version might read, “Jesus didn’t say it. I
don’t believe it. That settles it.”
From Hollywood celebrities to famous pastors, Jesus’ silence is being cited as the final authority on issues ranging from homosexuality to masturbation to street evangelism. This negative hermeneutic is the logical extreme of Red Letter Christianity.
Red Letter Christians emphasize the words of Jesus printed in red in
some modern versions of the Bible. The movement made its official entrance onto the evangelical platform nearly ten years ago, setting out
“to take Jesus seriously by endeavoring to live out his radical,
counter-cultural teachings as set forth in Scripture, and embracing the
lifestyle prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount.”
Red Letter Christians claim, “You can only understand the rest of the
Bible when you read it from the perspective provided by Christ.”
But practice can’t be separated from interpretation.
While the highest levels of biblical and literary hermeneutics seem to
confound us, a basic and valid interpretive lens for reading the Bible
can be as straightforward as approaching a great literary work.
(Of course, as most college freshmen will tell you—and this English
professor will confirm—skillful reading of literature doesn’t come
naturally. It must be learned.)
The inspired Word of God, the Bible is also a literary work written
with artistry, a narrative arc, and themes both major and minor. Just as
there are valid and invalid approaches to reading Huckleberry Finn,
there are right and wrong ways to read the Bible. As readers, whether
our text is God-breathed or merely mortal, we must take into account
genre, purpose, audience, structure, and point of view. We find meaning
by understanding each passage within context of the whole.
Consider the problem of the reliability of the narrator. In The Rhetoric of Fiction,
Wayne C. Booth describes a reliable narrator as one who “speaks for or
acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the
implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not.” Literary history
is filled with examples of unreliable narrators: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
Underground Man, Holden Caulfield, Lolita’s Humbert Humbert,
Huck Finn. Unreliable narrators can even be found in works of
nonfiction: Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Lena Dunham.
A certain level of readerly maturity, skill, and critical distance is
required to discern between a reliable narrator and an unreliable one.
For example, when Huck Finn tells us that his conscience is troubled for
treating Miss Watson “so mean” by assisting her runaway slave,
recognizing the unreliability of Huck as a narrator is imperative to
grasping the meaning of the text as a whole. On the other hand, when the
narrator of A Tale of Two Cities tells us, “It was the best of
times, it was the worst of times,” the skilled reader knows the
narrative voice reflects the view of the implied author.
An essential question for readers of the Bible is whether or not to
consider its narrators (as well as its Author) reliable—or, in other
words, authoritative. To use Booth’s terms, do the biblical narrators
speak in accordance with the implied author (God)? Those of us who
adhere to belief in the authority of Scripture and its God-breathed
inspiration accept that the various narrators of its sundry books are
reliable. They are not Huck Finn. And they are certainly not Humbert
Humbert.
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‘But Jesus Didn’t Say…’
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