This week continues The New Testament and the People of God in chapter 3 (pp 47-80), on literature, story, and worldview. There is quite a bit covered in this chapter and is setting up more of the 'ground rules' by which Wright will do his reading of the New Testament.
Since most history comes via literature, Wright begins by describing some of the ways of reading literature and how history is reported. I found this discussion helpful and it builds on his discussion of objective/subjective in the previous chapter. A naïve view of history is that the author is simply reporting the events of the past and you as the reader have direct access through this 'report' to the events (p 82). But, applying a critical lens should allow us to see that direct objective history ("just the facts, Ma'am") is not possible--an author will select and describe scenes, activity, and stories. To use an analogy of Dr. Bock's, there are multiple cameras at sporting events, each providing a different angle of the event. The angle itself determines what is visible ('selected') and what is not. Reading critically is understanding that the historical reporting is a selected (sometimes biased, inaccurate, false) report.
However, a post-modern, to my surprise, takes this to an extreme with a 'phenomenalist reading' of a text--the only thing that matters (and is knowable) is what the text means to me; everything else is unreachable. Yet I hear (and have said) this very thing frequently stated in Bible studies, "What this passage says/means to me..." The church has swallowed the culture. The intention of the author, the original culture, the meaning of the words in their context don't matter (or are unknowable); only the present 'phenomenon' of the text and me is meaningful at the moment. This, of course, means that everyone will construct their own meaning, no meaning is "right or wrong," allows the reader to throw away anything that offends, and ultimately, it prevents any possibility of accessing the past.
Wright advocates instead for a critical realistic reading (pp 61-4), where both the impact on the reader is acknowledged and the text as its own thing is recognized. The author wrote with the intent of communicating something; it is possible to access that (usually), but with caution, recognizing that the author may have lied, misreported, misunderstood, etc. In other words, we read critically but realistically. We also read understanding that such activity impacts us as readers--we might have our minds, or better yet, our worldviews changed! "I suggest that human writing is best conceived as the articulation of worldviews, or, better still, the telling of stories which bring worldviews into articulation." (p 65, emphasis original) You might begin to wonder if Wright is going to suggest that the purpose of the New Testament authors was to alter the reader's worldview(s). Absolutely!
Wright then moves on to a narrative analysis that I have found both delightful and very helpful, worked out by an A.J. Griemas (pp 69-77). It divides stories into three sequences and there is a careful format that is followed to expose the story form. One has to wonder what kind of tedious new diagramming technique these scholars are inventing, but there is a point! Often stories become so familiar we lose the essential emphasis of the story itself and this level of analysis allows us to identify it again. He takes the reader through the story of Little Red Riding-Hood and then turns to the parable of the vineyard (Mk. 12:1-12; pp 74-5). The jaw-dropping story point is that God will use Rome to judge the Jewish people for their failure to be the people God intended them to be! Talk about shaking up a first-century Jewish worldview. Jesus takes the story of Israel and redraws it (with himself at the center); Paul will redraw the Jewish story around Jesus (p 79). Wright finds the narrative analysis helpful in bringing this out more clearly and I found it very helpful throughout his work.
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