{"id":8618,"date":"2014-03-03T21:43:36","date_gmt":"2014-03-04T02:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/?p=8618"},"modified":"2014-07-17T13:58:23","modified_gmt":"2014-07-17T18:58:23","slug":"why-english-majors-make-lousy-fundamentalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2014\/03\/03\/why-english-majors-make-lousy-fundamentalists\/","title":{"rendered":"Why English majors make lousy fundamentalists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I think that the reason many Christians can\u2019t understand each other, particularly with regard to how we read the Bible, may end up boiling down to different personality types. I am an INFP, according to the Myers-Briggs system. I would tend to call it the personality type of a poet, or an English major, or perhaps a romantic. According to the Internet<\/a>, people like me \u201cdo not like to deal with hard facts and logic\u201d and we \u201cdon\u2019t understand or believe in the validity of impersonal judgment.\u201d I think that\u2019s reasonably accurate. But the important thing to understand is that English majors don\u2019t hate truth; what we hate is when people make truth look ugly and stupid (i.e. what an ESTJ probably calls \u201chard facts and logic\u201d). So I thought I would list some instincts that English majors bring to reading the Bible that make the fundamentalists gnash their teeth at us.<\/p>\n

1) Unsubtle communication is bad writing<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The measure of how good a writer you are is the degree to which you are able to communicate with subtlety. If I know how a sentence is going to end before I\u2019ve gotten there, then it\u2019s a crappy, uncreative sentence. To be unsubtle and completely straightforward is to be a bad writer. An English major assumes that the way to get people to do things is not to give them pristine clear commands to follow, but to tell a story that moves their hearts and sways them to respond the way that you\u2019re hoping they will. As an English major, I need for God to be an infinitely better poet than I am, which means that I\u2019m going to be averse to any approach to interpreting the Bible that camps out at a sixth grade level of reading comprehension and assumes God to be straightforward and perfectly clear when he seems to do a far better job of inspiring people with a little subtlety.<\/p>\n

2) Narrators are supposed to have agendas<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stories in which you can completely trust the narrator and\/or the protagonist are uninteresting and unrealistic. In so many Joyce Carol Oates novels that I\u2019ve read, the narrator has issues that slant how the story is told and thus become a part of the story themselves. So as an English major, when I read the gospel of Luke, I\u2019m going to be tuned into the way that Luke has crafted<\/em> his story of Jesus as a narrator. How is Luke\u2019s agenda different than Matthew\u2019s when he tells the same stories but puts different words into Jesus\u2019 mouth<\/em>? What can we speculate about the community that Luke is writing for that differs from the community Matthew is writing for? For fundamentalists, it\u2019s a scandalous betrayal of the text to say that the gospel writers had any kind of agenda other than dispassionately dictating whatever the proverbial angel whispered in their ears for them to copy down. For an English major, that\u2019s just dull writing.<\/p>\n

3) It\u2019s all about the metaphors<\/strong><\/p>\n

To an English major, what makes a piece of writing rich and poetic are the metaphors it employs. Metaphors are scary things to fundamentalists because they seem like a ploy to undermine the Bible\u2019s authority. To make Genesis 1 literal isn\u2019t just a problem for me because of its contradiction of modern science. It\u2019s a problem because there are so many cool things that the firmament, the waters above, and waters below could stand for metaphorically if they don\u2019t have to be literal scientific facts (take a look at what Augustine does with them in his books 11-13 of his Confessions<\/em>). When the Bible is \u201cnothing but the facts,\u201d then it\u2019s been robbed of a critically important layer of its beauty. The early church fathers had a very different interpretation of 2 Timothy 3:16 than we do today. When they read that \u201call scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching,\u201d they took that to mean that every detail<\/em> was pregnant with metaphorical<\/em> content<\/em>; nothing was mere historical backdrop. For example, Augustine interpreted the six jars of water that Jesus turned into wine in John 2:6 as the six ages of the world.<\/p>\n

4) We make analogies<\/strong><\/p>\n

This overlaps somewhat with #3. When you\u2019re an English major, you\u2019re always making analogies between different books that you\u2019ve read. For instance, Fyodor Dostoevsky\u2019s Brothers Karamazov<\/em> is about the three brothers Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha, while Leo Tolstoy\u2019s Anna Karenina<\/em> likewise includes three brothers Konstantin, Nicolai, and Sergius. So every time I read a story about three siblings, I always have these two great Russian novels in the back of my mind. In reading the Bible, I instinctively look for elements that might be analogies. In the New Testament, there are three major controversies<\/a> that become important analogies for me in Biblical interpretation: Jesus\u2019 Sabbath healing, the circumcision of the Gentiles, and eating ceremonially unclean foods. For fundamentalist Bible readers, these controversies are isolated incidents that have no bearing on how the church should handle analogous problems today. But an English major like me is going to draw an analogy between how these three issues were handled by Jesus and Paul and how the church should handle issues today including today\u2019s controversy of all controversies, which I\u2019m sure I don\u2019t have to name.<\/p>\n

5) We expect characters to be complicated<\/strong><\/p>\n

English majors have read lots of novels. What makes a novel elegant is how it develops its characters. Good literary characters are never purely good guys or bad guys. They are always complicated. So when I read the Bible and I see a character like Abraham, I see a complicated figure, not the model of perfect faithfulness, no matter what Paul and the author of Hebrews say about him. Abraham pimped out his wife twice to avoid getting killed. He refused to stand up to Sarah when she bullied Hagar and Ishmael. He was ready to murder his son Isaac, because a voice in his head that said it was God told him to do so. Because I\u2019m an English major, I talk back to Abraham and every other character in the Bible, including Mr. Infallibility himself, the apostle Paul. When I read Paul\u2019s letters, I hear his humanity come out. Sometimes I sympathize with him; sometimes I don\u2019t. While I appreciate Paul\u2019s zeal and his deeper vision, I\u2019m not sure I would do everything he told me to do if I were alive then because he can really be an arrogant jerk sometimes. A fundamentalist doesn\u2019t recognize Paul to have a character as such because Paul is simply a mouthpiece of God.<\/p>\n

6) Poetry trumps grammar and history<\/strong><\/p>\n

The default fundamentalist way of interpreting the Bible is grammatical-historical. What matters to the fundamentalists is how the words in the Bible were used in the time-period when they were written. That\u2019s the only meaning they are allowed to have. In contrast, an English major notices all the interesting poetic quirks about the words, which are allowed to influence their meanings. So for instance,the fact that the Greek word for church, ekklesia, <\/em>is the word used in the Septuagint for Hebrew religious gatherings and the word used in pagan society for public political assemblies doesn\u2019t make its meaning reducible to \u201creligious gathering\u201d for me. When I see ekklesia<\/em>, I see a compound noun combining ek<\/em> (out) and klesia<\/em> (calling). <\/em>So ekklesia<\/em> to me will always be about God\u2019s calling us out<\/em> of the world and into a new reality instead of being merely a \u201creligious gathering,\u201d because I see the word with a poet\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n

7) Every text has multiple voices<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you study novels in college, you\u2019re trained that it\u2019s a fallacious enterprise to try to determine the author\u2019s single, unequivocal \u201cintended meaning\u201d for a text. What\u2019s more interesting are all the rebellious dissenting voices within a text. I will never forget getting into a fierce debate in class over the Brothers Karamazov<\/em>. There\u2019s a character named Smerdyakov, the illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov, whom the narrator describes with pure contempt. It seems like the author Dostoevsky really wants for the reader to hate Smerdyakov, but he\u2019s so nasty to him that the text rebels against its author and quivers with outrage at Smerdyakov\u2019s treatment. I see the Old Testament quiver in a similar way when God strikes Uzzah dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant in 2 Samuel 6. Since God is a much more complicated, brilliant author than any of us could be, it\u2019s hard for me to believe that God doesn\u2019t anticipate the sympathy that readers will show for the declared \u201cbad guys\u201d in his text and that this sympathy isn\u2019t part of his calculated purpose in telling the story the way he does. To respond to the Bible without a heart seems like a greater crime against God\u2019s purpose than to protest whenever the Bible shows God doing something that doesn\u2019t jibe with Jesus\u2019 character. How do we know that God isn\u2019t baiting us into protest? Does God really have to be as unsophisticated as his most simple-minded readers? I happen to think that he\u2019s a real trickster just like Jesus is when he refuses to answer any question in a straightforward way.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think that the reason many Christians can\u2019t understand each other, particularly with regard to how we read the Bible, may end up boiling down to different personality types. I am an INFP, according to the Myers-Briggs system. I would tend to call it the personality type of a poet, or an English major, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1934,"featured_media":8619,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[265,3590,367,368,840,1001,1205,1295,1613,1850,2142],"class_list":["post-8618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-analogy","tag-bible","tag-biblical-authority","tag-biblical-interpretation","tag-english-major","tag-fundamentalist","tag-hermeneutics","tag-infp","tag-literary-criticism","tag-metaphor","tag-poet"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy English majors make lousy fundamentalists<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I think that the reason many Christians can't understand each other, particularly with regard to how we read the Bible, may end up boiling down to\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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