Erasmus on Interpretation

It's the generally accepted privilege of theologians to stretch the heavens, that is the Scriptures, like tanners with a hide.

– Erasmus

Reading John

Over at the Talbot blog you can find my new post on how to read the Gospel of John. It is a re-working of an older post (found here).

Dr. Seuss and Revelation

Last week, I taught a short seminar at HIM (which is Hawaii's biggest Christian conference) on how to read Revelation. To explain the nature of symbolism in Revelation, I used a few political cartoons (an idea that I got from David Scholer, one of my doctoral advisors at Fuller). And in honor of Dr. Seuss' birthday a few weeks ago, I used some of Seuss' political cartoons from the 30s and 40s. What is interesting, and what makes this relevant to the study of Revelation, is that Dr. Seuss' cartoons were immediately obvious to readers at the time, but are difficult to understand today unless we study history. If you are my age or older, you can immediately recognize the hammer and sickle in the chef's hands as a symbol of Communism or of the USSR - but if you are the age of many of my college students, you might not recognize the symbol. Most people today recognize the swastika on the pig's hat, but people from another time might not. You have to know something about history to recognize that the cartoon represents Stalinist Russia's defeat of Hitler's Germany. There's a few things I don't know - was this cartoon in response to a particular battle that Russia won? or in hopes of a victory? And what does the wreath on Joe's left arm symbolize?

Here's another one that made immediate sense to the original listeners. "Coughlin-ites" refers to followers of Charles Coughlin. Although he is obscure to us, Coughlin was the most popular radio speaker in the US during the 30s and early 40s (more than 40 million listeners, according to the infallible Wikipedia entry). Saying "Coughlin-ites" was something like saying "Ditto-heads" or "Limbaugh-ites" today. But Coughlin was sadly an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer who blamed the escalating European conflict on England rather than Germany.

In this cartoon, labels help identify the topic. Pearl Harbor and Manila on a couple of bricks show that Dr. Seuss is talking about the Japanese attacks that brought the US into WWII. Dr. Seuss, like others from his time, clearly felt that Japan's unannounced and unprovoked attacks broke the rules of warfare - and now it was time to take up some of the same dirty tricks? There are only a few symbols here: the top hat as a symbol for the US and a swastika for Hitler. Is the main figure an eagle, America's symbol? or is it a chicken, symbolizing fear? Note another culturally-bound image: Hirohito is portrayed in a manner many would now regard as racist. But is Seuss racist? Reading his other cartoons makes me think not - he was in favor of civil rights for African Americans long before it was popular.

You can see the relevance for studying Revelation: we cannot understand the meaning of symbols, such as the beast, 666, Babylon, the two witnesses, or any others, unless we know how people perceived those symbols in the ancient world. We also could easily misread the impact of certain images. Just as we might (mis)read Seuss as racist, rather than opposed to the aggression of Japan, some scholars (mis)read Revelation as anti-semitic, rather than responding to first-century Jewish-Christian tension.

Bible Genre Chart

One of the important aspects of interpreting the Bible (or any other type of literature) is paying attention to genre and adjusting reading strategies accordingly. You'll notice this emphasis in almost any book on hermeneutics. We pay attention to genre unconsciously when reading or even watching movies. We go into a sci-fi, romantic comedy, or action-adventure movie, and we have a set of expectations and an unconscious interpretational grid for that type of movie.

In the Bible, we also switch between various genres: poetry, wisdom, historical narrative, biography, epistles, apocalyptic literature, parables, and so on. I developed a handy-dandy chart to help guide readers through the various genres of the Bible. Unfortunately, the chart doesn't work well in blogger format, so you can access it here as a pdf (the pictures above are just snapshots). Feel free to make a copy if it helps you with your Bible reading.

Bad Interpretation and Erasmus

For a wonderful example of the nonsense that one can spout if one knows only a little bit of Greek and Hebrew, take a look at this video at Boulders 2 Bits. It's a bit long, but painfully and unintentionally funny. By the way, the author of Boulders 2 Bits is not promoting the views in the video!

It reminded me of a story that Erasmus told about some linguistic analysis that he heard that was almost as creative and tortured. You'll make the most sense of Erasmus' story if you know just a little bit of Latin.

"I met... another, some eighty years of age, and such a divine that you'd have sworn Scotus himself was revived in him. He... with wonderful subtlety demonstrate[d] that there lay hidden in [the letters found in the name of Jesus] whatever could be said of him; for that it was only declined with three cases, he said, it was a manifest token of the Divine Trinity; and then, that the first ended in S, the second in M, the third in U... those three letters declaring to us that he was the beginning, middle, and end (summum, medium, et ultimum) of all. Nay, the mystery was yet more abstruse; for he... split the word Jesus into two equal parts [and] left the middle letter by itself, and then told us that that letter in Hebrew was schin or sin, and that sin in the Scotch tongue, as he remembered, signified as much as sin; from whence he gathered that it was Jesus that took away the sins of the world. At which new exposition the audience were so wonderfully intent and struck with admiration, especially the theologians… ”

-Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, 1515 (and the picture is from that work)

Questioning John

When our semester begins next week, I will be teaching a class on the Gospel of John. One of the things I do in many of my Bible content classes is help students to ask better questions of the text. Very often, the reason we get little out of the text is that we are asking the wrong questions. For example, we may come to the text with a question like "How can I deal with my discontent?" or "What should I do to improve my marriage?" But if the passage we are looking at is not intended to answer such a question, we will likely learn very little.

In the gospel of John, here are a few of the questions that I ask as I read a scene:

• How does this scene demonstrate what we learned about Jesus in the Prolog of John? In other words, how does this scene draw our attention to the beginning of the book? Jesus as the incarnate Word, the source of light and life, the one opposed and misunderstood by his own, but accepted by a few; the one who reveals God; the source of grace and truth.
• How does this scene foreshadow Jesus' "glorification" - his death, resurrection and ascension? In other words, how does this scene draw our attention to the end of the book?
• How is Jesus revealed as the source of life? (related to the first question, but a dominant theme in many scenes)
• Do the closing sayings reveal something? In some cases, scenes end with a saying that helps understand the meaning of the scene.
• Are there any symbolic elements? Perhaps more than the other three gospels, John likes to use symbolism in his narratives. For example, John connects the Feeding of the Five Thousand with the Bread of Life discourse.

I'll be elaborating on these more in the next few months as I blog through the gospel of John.
The picture: St. John, by an unknown French illuminator, 1425.