How to Read the Bible as Literature: . . . and Get More Out of It

by Leland Ryken

  A wide acquaintance with visionary literature both in the Bible and in literature generally is a great asset because literary symbolism tends to be a universal language that recurs throughout literature. Such common symbols as thunder, earthquake, dragon, lion, or harvest occur often enough in visionary literature for us generally to know what they mean.

  A Keen Eye for the Obvious

  Above all, we should never minimize the usefulness of contact with everyday experience and a keen eye for the obvious. The purpose of symbols is not to conceal but to reveal. A few of the symbols in the visionary literature of the Bible no doubt had a contemporary meaning that has been lost, but for the most part all we need is a sensitivity to the obvious associations of literary symbols. We do not need a commentary to tell us that a sword symbolizes judgment or a throne power or a vineyard prosperity.

  Grasping the Total Meaning

  Nor should we allegorize every detail in a passage unless there is a hint that we are intended to do so. Often it is the total impact of a scene or action that conveys the meaning.

  The Mystery of the Supernatural

  Then, too, some of the images portraying supernatural reality are meant to convey a sense of more-than-earthly mystery. Naturally, much remains elusive in Ezekiel’s vision of the divine chariot (Ezek. 1). The images remain mysterious because their purpose is to convey the mystery of supernatural reality. Someone has contrasted the clarity of outline in Greek statues of the gods and the blurred edges of visionary writing in the Bible:

  The very clarity and definiteness of outline in those wonderful marbles stand out as a limitation: in comparison with these vague and mystical imaginings of the Christian seers the representations of Greek art are impotent. In the end the Greek statue of a god, for all its gracious beauty, is only a glorified and idealized man. The visions of the apocalypse, on the other hand, transcend once for all the limitations of human nature.3

  SUMMARY

  Visionary literature is what its name implies—an imagined picture, frequently symbolic rather than literal, of events that have not yet happened at the time of writing, or of realities such as heaven that transcend ordinary reality. Such writing requires that readers be ready to use their imagination—to let it fly beyond the stars. Visionary literature liberates us from the mundane and familiar and literal. It is an assault on our patterns of deep-level thought in an effort to shake us out of complacency with the normal flow of things. Visionary literature is a revolutionary genre. It announces an end to the way things are and opens up alternate possibilities.

  Further Reading

  The characteristic rhetoric, imagery, and generic features of apocalyptic writing are discussed in these sources: William A. Beardslee, Literary Criticism of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), pp. 53–63; Amos N. Wilder, “Apocalyptic Rhetorics,” in Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths, ed. James Breech (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), pp. 153–68; and vol. 14 of Semeia (1979), especially the introduction by John J. Collins (pp. 1–20).

  For Old Testament prophecy, J. Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1962), is good on the visionary element (see especially pp. 122–82).

  For literary commentary on the New Testament Book of Revelation, see the excerpts collected under that heading in The New Testament in Literary Criticism, ed. Leland Ryken (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984); and my book The Literature of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), pp. 335–56.

  1The Modern Reader's Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1895,1935), 1392.

  2Donald W. Richardson, The Revelation of Jesus Christ: An Interpretation (Richmond: John Knox, 1939), 16. For convincing statements of the same viewpoint, see the excerpts under “Revelation, Book of, Symbolism,” in The New Testament in Literary Criticism, ed. Leland Ryken (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984).

  3J. H. Gardiner, The Bible as English Literature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 272.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Literary Unity of the Bible

  A Book for All Seasons and Temperaments

  THE LITERARY RANGE AND DIVERSITY OF THE BIBLE are truly impressive. Written by a variety of writers over a span of many centuries, the Bible is an anthology of literature, as the very name Bible suggests (biblia, “books”). Previous chapters have demonstrated how the list of biblical genres keeps expanding. Every aspect of life is covered in this comprehensive book. Because the Bible is both comprehensive and written by a variety of writers, it preserves the complexities and polarities of human experience to an unusual degree. The paradoxes of life are held in tension in what can be called the most balanced book ever written. The Bible is truly a book for all seasons and every human temperament.

  The Literary Unity of the Bible

  But if we stress only the variety of the Bible, we distort the kind of book it is. For although the Bible does justice to the breadth and fullness of human experience in a marvelous way, it is also an amazingly unified book. The purpose of this concluding chapter is to suggest some important ways in which the Bible is one book. In keeping with the literary focus of my book, I will be concerned mainly with the literary unity of the Bible rather than its theological unity.

  THE BIBLE AS A STORY

  Narrative Unity in the Bible

  The most obvious element of literary unity in the Bible is that it tells a story. It is a series of events having a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even the external shapeliness of the Bible is remarkable. It begins with the creation of all things. The story of the Fall quickly takes the action down to the level of fallen history. But the story slowly and painfully winds its way to the consummation of history with the eternal defeat of evil and the triumph of good.

  The Unifying Plot Conflict

  The overall story of the Bible has a unifying plot conflict. It is the great spiritual and moral battle between good and evil. A host of details makes up this conflict: God and Satan, God and his rebellious creatures, good and evil people, inner human impulses toward obedience to God and disobedience to God. Almost every story, poem, and proverb in the Bible contributes to this ongoing plot conflict between good and evil. Every act and mental attitude shows God’s creatures engaged in some movement, whether slight or momentous, toward God or away from him.

  The Prevalence of Human Choice

  The presence of the great spiritual conflict makes choice on the part of biblical characters necessary. Every area of human experience is claimed by God and counterclaimed by the forces of evil. There is no neutral ground. Every human event shows an allegiance to God or rebellion against him. The Bible concentrates on the person at the crossroads. Life is momentous for the actors in this drama of the soul’s choice. Viewed as a story, the Bible is a series of great moral and spiritual dilemmas and choices, underscoring the biblical view of people as morally responsible.

  Human Choice, Not External Environment, Is Crucial

  In the episodes that make up the overriding story of the Bible, the decisive action does not reside in external reality itself but consists of a person’s response to what happens in the world. People’s problems do not stem from outward events or the material world. Their moral and spiritual choices in history are the crucial action in the ongoing story of the Bible. Its plot is thus a moral/spiritual action in which external events provide the occasion for significant action, whether good or bad.

  God as Protagonist

  Every story has a central protagonist, and in the Bible that protagonist is God. He is the central character, the actor whose presence unifies the story of universal history with its myriads of changing human characters. Roland Frye comments:

  The characterization of God may indeed be said to be the central literary concern of the Bible, and it is pursued from beginning to end, for the principal character, or actor, or protagonist of the Bible is God. Not even the most seemingly insignificant action in the Bible can be understood apart from the emerging characterization of the deity. With this great protagonist and his
designs, all other characters and events interact, as history becomes the great arena for Goďs characteristic and characterizing actions.1

  The Story of God

  It is obvious, then, that the chief element of progression in the overall story of the Bible is the unfolding purposes of God throughout history. Biblical scholars have taught us to call this “salvation history”—God’s great plan to save people from their sin and its eternal consequences. The story of the Bible is the record of God’s acts—in history, in nature, in the lives of people. Because it is God’s purposes that comprise the essential action, the overriding story of the Bible can be called the history of the human race within a providential framework of God’s acts of redemption from, and judgment against, the evil in the universe.

  SUMMARY

  If we stand back from the Bible and take it in at a single view, it is above all a story, with many interspersed passages that interpret the meaning of the events. Like other stories, the Bible has a beginning-middle-end pattern, a unifying plot conflict between good and evil, a focus on people in the act of choosing, and a central protagonist who is God.

  THE RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION OF THE BIBLE

  The Bible as a Religious Book

  The Bible is also unified by its religious orientation. It is pervaded by a consciousness of God. Human experience is constantly viewed in a religious or moral light. No matter how artistic and entertaining the Bible is, its writers have a didactic view of literature. Their purpose is to reveal truth to people so they can order their lives aright. Two oft-quoted descriptions of this aspect of the Bible are these:

  It is . . . not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite, it excludes or repels, the merely aesthetic approach.2

  The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world.3

  The Theme of the Two Worlds

  Part of the religious orientation of the Bible is the assumption of its writers that reality consists of two spheres. I call this the theme of the two worlds. Biblical writers take it for granted that there are two planes of reality—the physical world, perceived through the senses, and the supernatural world, invisible to ordinary human view. Both worlds are objectively real, but whereas earthly reality can be demonstrated empirically, the spiritual world must be accepted on faith. The constant appeal of biblical writers is for people to order their lives by the unseen spiritual realities, even though doing so usually contradicts earthly or human standards.

  The Sense of Ultimacy

  This transcendental stance of the Bible helps to produce two of its most constant and distinctive literary qualities. One is the sense of ultimacy with which the Bible invests human experience. What in most literature would be portrayed as a purely natural occurrence—the birth of a baby, a shower of rain, the daily course of the sun—is portrayed in the Bible as being rooted in a divine reality that lends spiritual significance to human and natural events. There is a continual penetration of the supernatural into the earthly order. God is a continual actor in human affairs. The result is that life becomes filled with meaning, since every event takes on spiritual significance.

  The Mystery of the Supernatural

  The supernatural slant of the Bible also produces a sense of mystery and wonder. By refusing to allow reality to be conceived solely in terms of known, observable reality, biblical literature continually transforms the mundane into something with sacred significance. As readers we are repeatedly confronted with a sense of the mystery of the divine beyond total human understanding. The Bible is a literature of mystery and wonder not because it conceals the spiritual but for precisely the opposite reason: it reveals the spiritual and thereby challenges the natural human tendency to explain life solely in earthly and natural terms.

  Preoccupation With History

  The theme of the two worlds does not mean that biblical writers take historical reality any less seriously. On the contrary, they take it more seriously than is true of most of the world’s literature. Biblical literature is firmly embedded in historical reality. It constantly claims to be history and has repeatedly been authenticated as history by modem archaeology. Compared with the fictional stories of modern writers, the storytellers of the Bible seem always to be eager to bring in historical facts. Snatches of historical chronicles, diaries, or genealogies are always creeping into the stories and poems of the Bible. Of course, the history of the Bible is not straightforward factual history. The historical facts are always presented within the interpretive framework of God’s dealings with the human race.

  Vivid Consciousness of Values

  The religious orientation of the Bible also includes the vivid consciousness of values that pervades it. Some conception of right and wrong underlies most literature, but in the Bible this conception is more sharply defined and more strongly held than elsewhere. For biblical writers the issue of what is good and evil is more important than anything else. Biblical authors are constantly saying, “This, not that.” Biblical literature is similarly pervaded by a conviction that some things matter more than others. Ultimate value does not reside in anything or anyone apart from its relationship to God, nor can human endeavor be regarded as ultimately valuable apart from obedience to God. In the Bible, good and evil are supreme realities and are the most important issues in people’s lives.

  SUMMARY

  One of the unifying elements in the Bible is its general sense of life. The prevailing attitude or perspective toward life throughout the Bible can only be called religious. It manifests itself most markedly in its awareness of supernatural reality and divine mystery, its conviction that human life in history is ultimately significant, and its vivid consciousness of values. These attitudes become the “air” within which biblical literature lives and moves and has its being.

  UNIFYING THEMES

  Unity of Subject Matter

  Any body of literature can achieve unity on the basis of its topics and themes. If individual writers and works share a common subject matter, the literature inevitably begins to create a unified impression in a reader’s mind. This is exactly what happens in the Bible. Individual biblical writers tend overwhelmingly to be preoccupied with a core of shared concerns.

  The Character of God

  Dominating everything is the character of God. The question of what God is like underlies more biblical passages than does any other concern. The most customary way of answering the question in the Bible is by narrating what God has done, but the Psalms, Prophets, Gospels, and New Testament Epistles also contain many direct statements about who God is in his inner being. This theme of God’s self-revelation is so pervasive in the Bible that nearly every passage will provide an answer to the overriding question, What is God like?

  The View of People

  Balancing this preoccupation with God is a constant concern with people. This is not surprising, because the subject of literature is human experience. Most works of biblical literature are an implied assertion about human nature and destiny. Repeated themes include the significance of the individual, the importance of the individual’s relationship to God and society, the simultaneous physical and moral/spiritual make-up of people, moral responsibility, and the capacity to make moral and spiritual choices.

  The corresponding questions to ask of the stories, poems, proverbs, and visions of the Bible include these: according to this passage, what are people like? What are their longings and fears? What values (for example, home, wealth, nature, God) are most worthy and least worthy of human pursuit? How can a person achieve meaning and happiness in life?

  The Divine-Human Relationship

  Usually the twin topics of God and people appear together in biblical passages, making the theme of the divine-human relationship one of the big ideas of the Bible. Roland Frye t
heorizes that

  the pervasive theme of the Bible is the interaction between individuals, societies, and God, and one of the pervasive purposes of the Bible is to derive out of these interactions a clarification of each of the constituent elements. Throughout it is assumed that man cannot understand himself apart from God. . . .4

  The theme of the divine-human relationship means that the Bible is a continuous exploration of people’s inescapable connections with deity and God’s unrelenting interest in what people do. The most customary biblical way of portraying this relationship is the idea of covenant.

  Human Evil and Suffering

  Biblical authors write in a painful awareness that the divine-human relationship has been disrupted. A literary scholar writes, “From the quantitative point of view, three central subjects emerge. . . . This threefold theme is the interest of God in man, the wrath of God, and the weakness or rather the wickedness of humanity.’’5 This is similar to T. R. Henn’s belief that “overriding all else” is “the problem, re-stated constantly and from many angles of experience, of evil and suffering.”6