Skirting Satan, Walking on Water and Feeding Five Thousand: preaching the text

Kudos Bo. You are addressing theological principles and processes not only in explaining how you approach interpretation (as a narrative, engaging, two-way interaction), but also you demonstrate in practice by responding similarly to readers and responders with interaction, engagement and openness. Way to integrate interpretation and application.

Thanks for this post, Bo. Just out of curiosity: what keeps you from making God a poetic-literary device?

still wondering how to move application into interpretation...

trust God, take risks as opposed to 'i'm going to step out of this boat' would be the application you refer to?

to preach the text with that in mind you would be wanting to find ways the congregation may be called to do those things - trust and risk - or witness to ways the preacher has trusted and risked in faith?

that sounds like what i often hear preached, so perhaps that is simply interpretation before application...

or are you suggesting that there is too much preaching on how incredibly miraculous and completely demonstrative of Christ's power it is to see him come walking across the waves? 

suspect i am mixing application and interpretation, but not in the way you suggest...

Ok, this time I'm going to try really hard to stick to the actual content and point of the post.

First, I totally agree that to read about Jesus walking on water or multiplying the food and have your application be to go out and try it yourself is a pretty weak hermeneutic. In fact I'd say that's no hermeneutic at all. I don't think you're saying that there's an alarming rise in the number of fundie drownings so we're all good there.

Second, you're saying that we should move our application up into our interpretation. I'd say that's all well and good. Certainly better than settling for the most straight forward interpretation possible and mapping that as directly as possible onto an application.

Third, I wonder if you could speak a bit to your ideas on authorial intent with these texts and how that should influence our application and our interpretation. It seems pretty clear to me that the authorial intent (at least of the synoptics) was not so much to weave a narrative (did they know about such things back then?) from which we could draw applications, as it was to simply set down an account of what they saw and heard or had been told (I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus...).

So, in my opinion, it seems like no matter what else we do (pursue the prophetic imagery, etc.) with interpreting a text, we should at least assume that when an event is recounted, even one with "miraculous" content, the event actually happened. Now if we come with the a-priori assumption that walking on water has never happened, will never happen and could never happen, then of course we can't do that. But I don't think I heard you say that (even if I did hear the straw-man in my head say that ;-) ).

Great post.  I get what you're saying but probably more because we have had allot of talks in person.

I believe all of those things happened but i agree that the application or the interpretation was never meant to be literal for us.

I was reminded of another part of scripture that is actually more up to date.  You don't find many churches trying to walk on water or multiply bread though there might be a few that do the demon battle.

BUT a few weeks ago a man died in either West Virginia or Virginia when he was handling a snake.  There is a whole denomination that has as its primary form of worship is handling snakes.  Mark 16:18 (oddly enough a piece of Mark that some think doesn't belong) says that believers will pick up snakes in their hands.  I find it funny that this denomination doesn't do the second part of the verse, drinking something deadly.

My point is that this snake verse proves your point even more.  I understand that miracles happen and all of us may have some disagreement on certain miraculous events in the Bible.  But as you have said most of them even if they are true, aren't meant for a literal application.

It amazes me that there is a denomination that just focuses & has built its whole organization around poisonous snake handling.  To me this is the worst case in the post modern era of taking something literally and COMPLETELY missing the application, interpretation and deep meaning in the text.  Even more crazy that its a text that may or may not be really a part of the book of Mark.

Anyway great post Bo.  I agree 100%.  Just remembered the snake handler Pastor dying and thought I'd throw that in the mix  haha.

Oddly my mother-in-law just gave me a collection of C.S. Lewis essays. Not sure what prompted it since it wasn't on my Amazon book list (me being far too sophisticated to read such a pedantic hack and all).

Anyway, wouldn't you know it the first essay I open to is called (in this edition) Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism. I'd never read it before, although I feel sure I've encountered quotes from it here and there. But it's amazing how he put into words something that I've been trying to put into words in my last couple of comments to your posts. Take this for instance:

"A theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia - which either denies the miraculous altogether or, more strangely, after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains at such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes - if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects. It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist. What you offer him he will not recognize as Christianity. If he holds to what he calls Christianity he will leave a Church in which it is no longer taught and look for one where it is. If he agrees with your version he will no longer call himself a Christian and no longer come to church. In his crude, coarse way, he would respect you much more if you did the same."

Googled and found the whole thing here: http://orthodox-web.tripod.com/papers/fern_seed.html

Quite possibly you've read it. Quite possibly it's as old as the hills and twice as dusty. But I found it to be a worthy challenge to the type of things you seem to be proposing. I'm way out of my depth with this sort of thing academically, but no matter what we may think of Lewis as an apologist or amateur theologian (I'm sure I'm not alone here in being ambivalent at best) he is certainly well within his field when it comes to the content of this essay.

Sorry to bomb you with not only a quote but a whole essay, and I certainly understand if you ignore it. But it really is saying, much better than I could, some of the kinds of things that are swirling around my brain as I think on these things. So, if you have a chance, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I've enjoyed both of your posts on this subject. I encounter the "cosmic bad guy overlord called ‘the Devil’ who is a being in charge of evil" riff so often it's tiresome and gave up on this along time ago - it's just frustrating that it gets pigeon-holed as another idea that I dissent from which I have to keep quiet on. As such I appreciate deeply that you have opened this one up - it's a topic that no one that I know of attempts to discuss sensibly.

Your approach also resonates with me. Between reading Daniel Kirk, Andrew Perriman and Brueggemann the ideas of "narrative" and "imagination" have been spinning around my head a lot recently. "The devil" is not a concept that is conjured in a vacuum - each gospel author, to take up your examples above, (with their culture/worldview bound faculties) is placing their lived experience within a wider imaginative field. Empire, oppression and struggle were all factors bearing down on them. I can only imagine that within what must have seemed to have been an apocalyptic period of time (approaching 70CE) recourse to "big (almost personifiable) evil" made sense for them. To recount the life and experience of Jesus (e.g. temptation narratives) for their community and to illicit continuity between their experience and Christ's own, especially when the structures around you seem almost inordinately malevolent, could only have been beautiful as that community found themselves (imaginatively!) located within the novum God had worked in the messiah-king. To say Jesus was now Lord over the structures (especially when everything within the dominant narrative said otherwise) that surrounded them - and with that "big evil", which had tried and failed to compromise his identity, in all its elusiveness - was an act of imagination.

I am certainly not compelled to speak of a "cosmic bad guy overlord" - I just don't have it in me! - and I am happy to let the text say what it says - if it speaks of a personified "big bad" called "the devil" - because the authors thought what they though and knew what they knew, when they thought and knew it. 

I can get on board with "big evil" - evil that seems so engrained and energised that it has to be spoken of differently - it's here I'm happy to affirm the language of demons, satan etc. as poetic and imaginative devices, out of respect for the text - that language has the potential to help us open up the story in imaginative ways - because we know enough about "big evil" across the board of human experience to have to name it.

Thanks again Bo!

Wow great post Bo. I wonder: the approach you're using -- the literary-textual approach -- is something I assume all students of humanities, literature, poetry and english employ in their studies. I've never been to seminary (I'm an arts guy), don't seminary people learn this? Also, this post makes me think of the stuff Kester Brewin has been posting on his blog about religion as an illusion, where he makes the point that people don't go to magic shows expecting to see something supernatural, but we don't go there to ridicule the whole thing either. We don't suspend our belief in the natural, rather we suspend our unbelief in the supernatural. We give ourselves knowingly to the ‘trick’ in order to receive a gift from its particular world. KB points out that it is "paradoxically within this fictional space that the greatest truth is played out."

I know this is probably starting to sound like a broken record from me, Bo. Sorry. Bit this still sounds like an either/or that doesn't need to be. If the point you're trying to make is that we should look for the literary application of the text, I don't know too many of us who would disagree with you. The "so what" is a critical component of any meaningful teaching/study. When the controversy starts is where its perceived that we should look at the literary application of the text INSTEAD of the more literal translation. I don't think that's what you mean because you did make the point of saying you do believe in miracles and the reality of some things that just cannot be rationally explained. So what are you saying? Because I agree that Jesus feeding 5000 doesn't mean wert shouldn't buy bread our plan ahead. But it does tell us we should take risks. But what we miss out on if we ignore the the literal reading is that God has shown us that he is really big and can do miraculously things. Not that he WILL always, and definitely not on demand, but that he CAN. In that sense the literal and the literary application can peacefully coexist and even compliment one another. So if your point is we should be careful what we extrapolate from the text to be sure it affirms God's greatness and not out own ability to manipulate God's greatness, I agree 100%. I just don't think we have to disregard all possibility demons and spirits to do it.

Just a brief correction to start off with :). That quote that you highlight originally came from Nithin, not me.

Hello Bo, thanks again for bringing up this discussion.  I am learning a lot from the interaction.  Here are a couple of thoughts that come to my mind. 

I think your first objection goes back to authorial intent.  I don't think that we can get to the authors actual meaning, we can get close approximations.  That is why I think the understanding of demons as independant personal beings is the best approximation of the world of the text.  Everett Ferguson has done some great work in this area as well as Clinton Arnold.

As for the second objection, I do agree that we won't lose power, but the way we read the text will change.  I am not as comfortable as you are yet of viewing the creeds simply as time capsules, that seems to me a little too foot loose and free for my comfort level.  Rather, I see them as guide posts that keep us on the path. 

I have no problem with relocating the application into the interpretation.  I would need to think about it more.  Although I did have a question on that.  Is it naive to believe that maybe, just maybe, we should interpret those narratives more "literally?"  Why not attempt to feed 5000, walk on water, or pray against the storm?  I've done some of those things and seen God answer? 

I think the main disagreement that Dan and I had, was more of an ontological one.  Or, do Satan and demons actual exist as real beings or quasi-beings (NT Wright mentions this in one of his books)?  I am of the opinion that yes, they do.  What is their actual nature or ontology, I don't know.  The text doesn't say, or care, only that we need to resist them, expell them, and turn to Jesus.  The bigger priority being to turn to Christ.

I still think that we come to similar conclusions (get the demons or shadows out), but have are on different conceptual paths.  I do want to commend you, that I think a progressive approach is needed.  My background is United Methodist and when I talk to those folks about this issue they are spooked and think I'm from another dimension.  But I feel that your giving words and concepts to things that liberals and progressives need to be about.  So thanks.  Looking forward to your response.