The Rise and Fall of the Bible

by Timothy Beal

  I suggest we think of the Bible in a kindred way. The Bible does not stand alone. Its canon is closed, but only loosely so. The ever-growing body of biblical interpretations and other creative works inspired or otherwise provoked by the Bible are part of it, like new wings and annexes to the library (and some of these new spaces get a lot more traffic than the older ones). In its hosting of disagreement, the canon of the Bible remains open, inviting us to enter, explore, and add our voices to the ongoing conversation.

  The Bible creates community by providing space for community to happen. It offers storied worlds and theological vocabularies around which people can come together in conversation about abiding questions. It calls for creative, collaborative participation. This is true especially for Christians. It is “our” library of questions and pool of imagination, the place we gather to read again in order to find meaning in new situations. In its many voices, perspectives, and contradictions, it both embraces the diversity of voices among us and provides a context in which we can affirm unity within that diversity—not by agreeing about what it means but by joining in the creative, meaning-making process of interpretation that it hosts.

  Here again we may find insight from Jewish tradition’s understanding of Torah. One legend says, “When the Holy One, blessed be he, gave the Torah to Israel, he gave it only in the form of wheat, for us to make flour from it, and flax, to make a garment from it.” The idea is that God depends on the community to fulfill biblical meaning. The Torah is incomplete without its interpreters who make something new of it. God rejoices to see what meanings come from the creative, generative labors of the people. Everything is there, this tradition proclaims, and it is the call of the Jewish people throughout history to discover as many meanings as possible.

  It is no coincidence, by the way, that Jacques Derrida, who gave us the phrase “impoverishment by univocality,” was Jewish and had a deep and abiding appreciation for the interpretive traditions of Rabbinic Judaism.

  Back to the Future

  What might this process of rereading look like in practice? Let me offer three illustrations that give a sense of the range of possibilities, from the Internet to the kitchen table to the church pew.

  Earlier we considered the impact of the digital revolution on the cultural icon of the Bible, how the end of print culture will also mean the end of the Word as we know it, that is, the end of the idea of the Bible as a book, the Book, and so on. By the same token, I believe that this revolution also opens new possibilities for engaging Scripture in vital, virtual communities that privilege process over product and questions over answers. Three dimensions of reading and writing in our emerging digital, networked media culture are especially suggestive. First, this culture is hypertextual, meaning that any text within it, including Scripture, is linked to a vast, practically infinite network of other texts, images, and other digital media. These are all present as an excess of potential relationships. Texts overflow, spilling into others. The line between text and context is always permeable and negotiable.

  Second, digital network culture is processual. Complex relations within it are always in the process of formation, deformation, and reformation. There is no end game. Everything is impermanent—adaptable, combinable, editable, cut-copy-and-pastable.

  Third, digital network culture is collaborative. Not only are texts connected to one another in ongoing, ever-changing networks. So are the people reading, writing, and creating meaning within those networks.

  Although still largely unrealized, the potential implications of these three dimensions of the digital network revolution for biblical interpretation are not hard to see. Loosed from its binding in the book, the canon of Scriptures loses its tight closure. Biblical words and phrases are easily linked up with other texts, both biblical and extrabiblical. Individual biblical writings are easily removed from the larger canonical whole to float independently. Smaller snippets of biblical texts are copied, edited, and pasted into new contexts, thereby creating relationships between them and previously unrelated texts. Likewise, other texts can easily find their way into the biblical canon. Interpretations and marginal comments may be inserted, for example.

  To some, this may look like doomsday, the end of the Word set in the context of the end of the world. And yet, ironically, it also looks very like the scriptural culture of early Christianity. Indeed, scriptural culture after the book may have much in common with scriptural culture before the book. There, as we saw, Christian communities were theologically and culturally diverse, with no central organization. Scattered throughout the Roman Empire, specific groups were connected to others through more or less informal networks. Different communities had different collections of scriptures, written in different languages and stored in different media forms, and they copied and shared them within these networks. Their testimonia essentially created new scriptural texts from older sources.

  As in early Christianity, moreover, the ongoing process of biblical engagement in digital networked culture is beyond anyone’s authority or control. There is no central administration. It’s about participation in a social world where readers are writers and consumers are producers. Here meaning and value are created collaboratively within constantly changing networks of communication and community. Nor is there any end in sight. Everything is impermanent, inconclusive. Everything is subject to revision and reformulation.

  Living Conversations

  The second illustration may seem more old school, but it is equally suggestive of the power of the Bible, as a library of questions and pool of imagination, to generate new meanings in new contexts and thereby affirm both unity and diversity in communities whose members engage one another around it. It comes from a public television series hosted by Bill Moyers called Genesis: A Living Conversation. Each of its ten hourlong sessions brings together a handful of people, some scholars, some writers, from different religious and nonreligious backgrounds, around a single short story from the book of Genesis. The format is very simple. They sit in a circle and talk about the story, keeping their comments and questions grounded in the details of the text.

  As each conversation progresses, one has the feeling that there are at least as many versions of the story as there are people in the room. Nonetheless, the different voices and readings stay connected to each other through respectful, even if sometimes a little contentious, conversation. In the end, there is no agreement or adjudication by Moyers, no final word on what the story means or how to understand it. But there is a much richer, deeper appreciation for the biblical story, the questions it raises, and how those questions relate to the particular experiences of those who have participated.

  The tremendous success of the Genesis series testifies to the generative power of biblical stories, which turn out to be far less familiar than we thought they were: Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, and so on. It also testifies to the desire among people from a variety of religious and nonreligious backgrounds to engage in open conversation in which the whole is greater than the sum of its participants. It speaks to the power of biblical texts to spark lively, meaningful, mind-changing encounters.

  I often show a video of one of the sessions to my students as a model for how we might engage this literature. When it’s over, they don’t want to talk about the celebrity scholars, authors, and artists who said their piece on screen. They want to talk about the biblical story. They want to continue the conversation. In fact, I find that this model for biblical discussion works better with people who are not scholars, who are not used to speaking with authority about biblical literature. They tend to have less investment in a text meaning one thing and not another, and they are more open to surprise.

  No matter what kind of people are gathered around the biblical text—a class of college students, a group of friends on a Thursday night, or participants in a Sunday-morning adult-education class at church—and no matter what biblical text is the focus of conversation, two simple ground rules are important. First, the
biblical selection needs to be small, never more than a page, and preferably less. Second, no comment or question is off-limits so long as it emerges from specific details of the passage at hand.

  People who’ve never experienced this kind of open-ended conversation around such a small piece of biblical text often worry that they’ll run out of things to talk about, that there’s not enough there to sustain much of a discussion. But such concerns are quickly dispelled. On the contrary, people are inevitably surprised when they run out of time. It feels like they’ve barely scratched the surface. Which is true. When it comes to biblical literature, the closer you look, the more you see.

  Seeds to Go Around

  Our last example of what it looks like to practice what I’m preaching comes, appropriately enough, from the pulpit.

  Last year, our church developed an adult-education program inspired by the “living conversation” model I just described. Around the same time, my wife, Clover, and her pastoral colleague, John Lentz, began asking how they might bring some of the same participatory spirit of biblical interpretation into the worship service. How to get away from the traditional, one-way mode of sermonic communication, in which the preacher tells the congregation what she or he believes the Bible is saying, and they passively receive it?

  In that spirit, Pastor Lentz recently “preached” on Jesus’s parable of the sower in the Gospel of Matthew. He began with a few brief introductory remarks to set up the passage. Parables, he explained, are like extended metaphors, in which something familiar, like a story about planting seeds, is compared to something unfamiliar, like the kingdom of God. In fact, scholars believe that the parable was Jesus’s signature mode of teaching. Which is interesting because, like all metaphorical thinking, parables offer poetic meaning that is not easily nailed down in a simple equation of this equals that. In fact, Jesus’s parables often seem to confuse and complicate rather than clarify and simplify, even for his disciples. With this particular parable in Matthew, there’s actually an interpretation that follows. But that explanation wasn’t originally part of the teaching. It was added later. As a pastor, John proposed that we focus on the parable alone, to let it stand without explanation, to see what we can see. “So now, as we hear this familiar parable of the sower, imagine its words are being sewn on you.”

  A member of the congregation read the passage.

  Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen! (Matthew 13:2–9)

  After a minute of silent reflection, John invited people in the congregation to share their own first impressions of the parable. A well-liked gentleman with a booming voice who regularly participates in adult-education classes spoke first, summarizing the “Sunday school” version many people know. It’s about God planting seeds of grace and salvation in different people, he explained. Some people, maybe one in four, have “good soil” and the seed thrives in them; in most, however, it doesn’t take.

  “Are you familiar with that message?” John asked the congregation. Nearly everyone nodded. “Well, how does it make you feel?” People began to perk up. Several scooted forward in their seats.

  “I must be one of those bad guys with bad soil,” one man said.

  “I worry, what have I done with the seed in me?” a woman called out.

  “Where’s my seed?” a high school boy asked. Others laughed and nodded.

  These honest first responses quickly broke open the text and the congregation. Both began to open up. New possible meanings, rereadings, began to emerge. Maybe each of us has all kinds of soils in us. Have the birds gotten a bad rap? After all, they don’t just take seeds away. They spread them to new places. Seeds have lots of chances to take. Surely Jesus’s agriculturally minded audience would’ve known that.

  What about the one sowing the seeds? Shouldn’t he know where and where not to sow? Is he being rational, practical? He’s just scattering seeds all over the place, with no discretion. His actions seem downright wasteful and excessive. If we think of the sower as God, what does that say? Maybe that God is not stingy or even careful about where he scatters the seeds? That divine grace is lavishly, uneconomically, improvidently broadcast all over the place.

  And what if we are the sowers? What does the life of faith look like from that angle? We too can be carelessly, wastefully free. As we talked, and as the excitement of the congregation grew more and more palpable, I imagined children playing in heaps and heaps of seeds, tossing them into the air like balls in a McDonald’s play area. An image of the kingdom of God.

  John had wisely trusted that simply hosting a gathering of these people and this text would produce new fruit, and he remained open to whatever surprises that process might bring. By the end of the “sermon,” John’s role had changed from preacher to facilitator. There was no wrapping up, no bringing it all back to a single point. The open-ended process of rereading had itself become a sacramental moment, a means of receiving and sharing seeds of grace. The many voices remained present in all their diversity of insight and experience, echoing in and through the final “amen.”

  Word Without End

  The great rabbi Yosef Chaim once described the din of students reading, interpreting, and debating passages of Torah in their house of study as words rising through the roof and up to heaven. The indecipherable racket of the many voices interpreting Scripture was like a hymn of praise to God. He imagined God glorying in the ongoing, noisy process of interpretation, the cacophony of meanings without end.

  In kindred spirit, what if we were to think of the Word of God not as bound between two covers of a book but as that endless noise of interpretation, an inconclusive process that we are invited to join? What if that cacophonous hymn, rising up across time and space from digital networks, living rooms, lunchrooms, churches, and bus stops is the living Word of God? An endless, inarticulate din of talking, arguing, reading, and rereading in the library of questions. The Word as we don’t know it. The Word as we live it. Word without end.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK HAS BEEN the greatest challenge of my life as a scholar and writer, and I have never relied more heavily on more people. I am especially grateful to friends and colleagues who generously offered critical insights and support at many stages in my research and writing process, especially Robin Craig, Bill Deal, Pam Eisenbaum, Ed Gemerchak, Barry Hartz, John Lentz, Tod Linafelt, Brent Plate, Jean Reinhold, Lou Rice, Jana Riess, and Tom Zych. I have also benefited greatly from opportunities to present my work in progress to thoughtfully engaged audiences at Maryville College, the Iconic Books Symposium at Syracuse University, St. Andrew’s College of the University of Saskatchewan, the Rocky Mountain-Great Plains meeting of the American Academy of Religion, the Tel Mac Theory Lunch and Praxis Breakfast in Diaspora, the Whitehead Salon, Pioneer Church, and Forest Hill Church.

  Thanks also to many people variously involved in the Bible-publishing business, some named, most not, who offered stories and information that helped me make my own sense of that fascinating world, and to friends and friends of friends who shared a wealth of personal biblical experiences, including Patti and Bill Munk, Mel and Cliff Taylor, Darlene and Chuck Gilbert, Peggy and Carl Johnson, and especially Stephanie Ramos.

  I could not have completed this book without generous assistance from Case Western Reserve University, especially: a Foreign Travel Grant from the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities for research in Rome; a Library Opportunity Grant from the Kelvin Smith Library to acquire market research data on Bible sales; a sabbatical during which I completed drafts of the early chapters; enthusias
tic help from Sue Hanson, head of Special Collections at Kelvin Smith Library; administrative assistance from Sharon Skowronski and Lauren Gallitto in the Department of Religious Studies; and collegial support from my department chair, Peter Haas. I am also grateful for hospitality during several visits to the archives of the American Bible Society in New York, especially from Liana Lupas, curator of the Scripture Collection, and Jacquelyn Sapiie, Library Services supervisor.

  I do most of my writing at local cafés and diners, and am pleased to acknowledge them here: Amy Joy Donuts, Arabica, Big Al’s, Dink’s, Eat at Joe’s, Inn on Coventry, Michael’s, Tommy’s, and Yours Truly.

  In the course of research and writing, I have had innumerable occasions to recall my deep gratitude to my professors and mentors, especially Walter Brueggemann, David Gunn, and Carol Newsom, whose scholarly integrity, love of biblical studies, and willingness to share power and opportunity with those fortunate enough to be their students will always be my aspiration.

  Many thanks to my editor, Andrea Schulz, who has steadfastly believed in me and in this book, from genesis to revelation, and to her smart and savvy editorial associates, especially Lindsey Smith, Christina Morgan, Melissa Dobson, and Lisa Glover. Thanks also to my literary agent, Gail Ross, and her associate, Howard Yoon, for their keen interest, friendly professionalism, and good-humored patience throughout the process.

  As ever, I am especially grateful for Clover Reuter Beal, best colleague, Presbyterian shaman, and love of my life, for listening, reading, challenging, enlightening, and keeping faith.