Photo: Trish Carn.
Reading the Bible
Richard Seebohm reviews a new book by A N Wilson
The Book of the People – How to Read the Bible is a new book by A N Wilson, a prolific writer of histories and novels. As the title implies, his concern here is more about the readers than the writers of the diversity of books that comprise it.
Some of us see scripture as a rulebook, laced with stories of the communities that followed the rules or flouted them, and as a record of preachers who tried to get the rules observed. With this attitude, furthermore, a lot of scholarship has been devoted to the pursuit of how historical truth can be reconciled with the narratives and personalities that fill the canon of books. There are the disputed timelines of both their content and their authors – to say nothing of the vagaries of translation.
Wilson sets against this a vision of the Bible as an encounter, an experience. This can only be with the deepest transcendence, compassion (though Wilson does not use those words) or spiritual insight that humans are capable of. The most convenient way to define this is ‘meeting God’. This is not God as a mover and shaker, and certainly not as a gendered being. What he says of the rationalists is: ‘They refused to see the living power of myth’.
Another book I have been reading is Category Mistakes by Ofra Magidor. She uses examples like ‘the theory of relativity is eating breakfast’. I’m not reviewing this book except to say that she acknowledges the existence of metaphor but ignores poetry. The category mistakes that most concern her she castigates as examples of meaninglessness or, at best, of infelicity. However, she admits that ‘presuppositions’ can pave the way for otherwise jarring metaphors.
I wonder how she sees the poetry of the American poet Wallace Stevens, quoted extensively in Wilson’s book. His use of metaphors and non-sequiturs seems to veer towards category mistakes, but they make you treat the poems as complete entities.
What this leads me towards is to think of the two views of the Bible as a great big category mistake – you cannot go with both. You could use the phrase paradigm shift, but that is both modish and inexact. A further feature of Wilson’s book is his structure. It uses the form of a sporadic written dialogue with a rather older fellow-student, who he admits to be a conflation of other interlocutors. One is led to question the category of the book – is it a treatise or a fiction? Is his friend ‘L’ real or imagined, although he records her death scene in a convent?
Treating the Bible as a gateway to grace is wholly consistent with the place of the silent Meeting in our Quaker lives, which allows evangelical Friends to worship alongside avowed nontheists without treading on each other’s toes. From here I am led to think of the Jewish community, where the Orthodox seek to please their (or our) God by following the Torah, with Liberal Jews treasuring their identity while adapting to the culture around them. Now the Qur’an is certainly a rulebook for the warring Sunni and Shi’a scholars and their followers, but we who lack the Arabic language are told that the poetry and musicality of the prophet Muhammad’s words provide an aesthetic experience that transcends the literal message. This category change might, just might, provide a foothold for the emergence of a more focused liberal Islam.
Comments
I just bought this book a couple of weeks ago but, have not started it as I am finishing some others. Now I am really looking forward too.
By asruth on 13th June 2016 - 21:52
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