The Interpretation of Scripture – Bible Classics Speaking Directly to our Human Experience

Continuing reflection on the emerging paradigm and our experience of Scripture.

I want to take the liberty of sharing a personal reflection that for me illustrates how David Tracy’s (b. 1939) category of story as classic engages our experience and imagination. I reflect on David Tracy’s insights in our June Awe and Wonder newsletter.

Let me first note the distinction between exegesis and eisegesis. Two technical terms used to describe interpretation of scripture. Exegesis literally means, “to lead out of.” Through careful critical study and analysis an interpretation comes out of the text. By this process the text’s interpretation is discovered. Exegesis is considered “objective.” Eisegesis, “to lead into,” describes an interpretation that is subject to ones own agendas and understanding. The text engages the reader to lead into their own ideas, into their own lives. Eisegesis is subjective to the interpreter. Both are ways to interpret scripture. It is important to know the difference. I mention this as a kind of foreword to David Tracy’s understanding of classic stories.

To recap from our newsletter: Tracy describes classics as stories that bear an “excess of meaning,” “resist definitive interpretation” and “function like an event.” They “happen to us.” (They fall into the camp of eisegesis.)

I want to illustrate how a classic story can function, as I understand it, through a recent experience of my own.

The Temptation Story

I was walking with my pup Abbey one morning along Desert Sage Road. We live in a high desert climate. We are surrounded by juniper and sage. The roads in our ‘hood are gravel or dirt. As I was walking, the “temptation story” as it is commonly called, came to my mind. It is the New Testament story of Jesus being “driven” (the gospel of Mark’s word) or “led” (Matthew and Luke’s word) into “the wilderness.” And there he is “tempted by the devil.” (I am not keen on the shorthand description “temptation story.”)

In the story according to Mark, Jesus is confronted with wild beasts. And angels waited on him. In Matthew and Luke Jesus is confronted with questions of ultimate concern.

The “temptation story” with slightly different details, and in striking metaphors, describes a universal experience: a time when we confront our fears and beliefs and mortality and have questions called on what we think is important and real and who we really are.

Native American Vision Quests

Perhaps our most familiar “wilderness” experience is from the Native American tradition: a vision quest. (Traditionally in Native culture a vision quest was an adult rite of passage for young men.) It is a time when our purpose in life or role in community or how best to serve is discerned. The process taxes all our capacities. Some accounts say not until the person becomes comatose, or in a state of deep unconsciousness, might a vision emerge. (And comes through natural symbolism like animals or forces of nature.)

Back to Desert Sage Road and the back-story behind the Jesus story that came to me while walking. (By the way, Augustine, says “all things are cured by walking”!)

Marc and I moved to Central Oregon in the end of December 2011. We left our urban home and community of twenty plus years. I retired. Marc wanted to travel less. We moved to an unfamiliar landscape with a subtle and muted palette. We made this move without much planning or premeditation. A number of things led us to this location and property. Most notably my stepson and his husband’s familiarity with the area. I was interested in horses and wanted more sun. Marc was not as enamored with the city as I. The location of our new home provided spacious skies and mountain views. A beautiful rural setting. We thought this is the time and this is a place for a new adventure at our life stage.

By August 2014 Marc was diagnosed with cancer. By January 2015 he was dead. The years since have been hard. Nothing prepared me for Marc’s death. For all my emotional and theological resources Marc’s death was overwhelming. I deeply miss our particular work of love. I miss his intellectual elegance and integrity. I miss him. I still can’t believe he is gone.

Barbara Brown Taylor mentioned in her homily at Marc’s memorial service that I experienced Marc’s love after his death. I did. I continue to. (It was that experience that gave me insight into the story of Jesus assuring his disciples “my peace I leave with you. My peace I give you… trouble not your heart.”) Marc left me his love. I told Barbara I felt it on a molecular level. It gave me solace. Even so his death threw me into a disorienting time. As a friend put it, a disassembling time. German philosopher Heidegger (1889-1976) has a word for this. (You might imagine.) I learned this word from Marc. Geworfenheit. A description describing individual existence as “being thrown.” I was thrown. Thrown off. Thrown into an existential crisis.

For months I couldn’t listen to the radio. Or watch television. I could hardly read. I needed quiet. And solitude. I literally felt something moving deep in my brain. There was some “work” happening it seemed. Non-verbal. I didn’t want to interfere with it.

I wondered if a kind of liminal place I rarely reach in apophatic meditation might be the closest threshold I could get to Marc. So I plunged into silence and opportunities for structured silence.

Slowly I am working through my grief and loss.

Walking Through Grief

We all experience grief. And we experience it differently. We don’t know how it will affect us. Marc’s death was a grief like no other I had experienced before. Furthermore, his death called the question on everything.

As I walked down Desert Sage Road and Abbey was scampering after desert cottontails, a thought came to me through the story of Jesus and his “vision quest.” I was in mine. Suddenly my last four years were provided a frame. An existential context. It helped me begin to identify the issues and opportunities that were pressing upon me. And Jesus’s story helped me realize that my “thrownness” could be thrown off. Vision quests can feel like no-escape. But when we do return we realize we are alive after all. And changed.

The gospel story of Jesus in the wilderness functioned for me like a classic. The story was like an event that day. It happened to me. And transformed my horizon. It located me in a landscape and described an inscape that I had not been able to see as functional before. I began to see that the recent events of my life and Marc’s death had the effect of driving me into a “wilderness,” into a vision quest.

A Desert Bloom

Now I glimpse possibility. And can imagine a desert bloom.

My experience of the Jesus story that day is not an interpretation of the text. But my experience of the text led me into a broader understanding of my own journey at this moment. Now the task before me is clearer. That will be another event!

I am sure you have had comparable experiences with Bible stories. Because they are classics. Particular stories addressing universal concerns. They have a way of speaking directly to our human experience and human condition and illumine them. Classics continue to live because we do. And they can help us live as well.

I hope you share with one another how a story has functioned like a classic for you. Classics help us see ourselves. They ultimately address issues of freedom and authenticity.