Hello, all,
I have been away from my computer for a week, able to monitor the voluminous listserv messages on a webmail site but unable to respond. The following topic has been dealt with by several, but I want to add another angle.
Someone wrote: "If you believe Genesis 1 is just a story, you have weak faith."
Whenever my students used to express a similar comment, usually something like, "I don't want the Bible to be considered just stories," I would ask them to remove the "just" from the sentence (the "weak" in the present sentence has already been challenged, rightly). No story is "just a story," and it is sad that the word "story" has been so denigrated, mainly, I regret to say, by literalists who claim to be defending the Bible from such a charge and imput this notion to those who disagree with them. We who recognize and value the power of stories need to defend "story" from this dismissive view.
A Bible scholar (I believe it was Joseph Fitzmeyer) said that the biblical writers used story to teach theology. And for good reason. Every story makes a truth claim, and this is certainly true of sacred stories, whether they be historical accounts, myths, folktales, parables, or whatever. There seems to be an assumption among some believers that stories are fiction, hence not true, and therefore any narrative in the Bible has to be a historical account in order for it to be true. But surely it impoverishes the concept of "truth" to limit it to the historical, when the most important and profound truths, in the Bible or in any other writings, sacred or otherwise, are theological, moral, and philosophical. "Fiction" is not "falsehood" and the opposite of fiction is history, not truth. How strange it is to assume that God could not use inspired fiction (e.g., the Book of Jonah, which an ancient Hebrew would be likely, rightly, to recognize as a mashal (parable)), to teach profound truths (as this book does), when we human beings use fiction in this way all the time! (And even historical narratives are interpretations, not descriptions of what actually happened, as indeed are the historical narratives in Scripture.)
Elie Wiesel once said that "God made man because he loves stories." I love the ambiguity in that statement: Does "he" refer to God or man? Both, I think.
Bob Schneider
rjschn39@bellsouth.net
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