Touche and righton. And the parable of the Prodigal son conveys more for me
as much truth(albeit a different kind of truth) as any scientific or
historical fact. I love Weisel's quote , as well as the story it comes from.
-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
Behalf Of Robert Schneider
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2002 8:22 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: BIBLE Stories
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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