In the chapter of his book, The Bible Makes Sense, which I've been excerpting and commenting on, Walter Brueggemann gives a diagram of the structure of The Bible in concentric circles around a central circle, I can't reproduce the diagram but starting from the central circle, the parts of the bible, growing out of the primal narrative are given:
- Primal narrative,
- Expanded narrative,
- Derivative narratives (built on both the primal and extended narratives)
- And in the outer most circle are:
Mature theological reflections, Instruction and vocation and, Institutionalization.
I mentioned last week that the footnotes and commentary found in the Geneva Bible, the product of the much maligned Calvinists* to be interesting and at times surprising. The Geneva Bible was the most commonly used Bible in the English speaking world in the late Elizabethan period and it was the Bible that was brought to New England by the pilgrims and early Puritans. Marilynne Robinson implies in some of her essays that it is the origin for much of traditional American liberalism. I hadn't known until fairly recently that the motive of James the First to commission the King James Version of the Bible was because he didn't like things like the footnotes saying that people were not bound to obey the authority of kings when those conflicted with the morality of the Gospels and other Scriptures, he wanted a Bible that put his authority over that of the Scriptures. I wonder at the historical effects of that might have been in subsequent English culture and in other English speaking countries, especially in places where the KJV seems to be believed to be the only authentic scripture, even over the original language texts, a thing of idolatry instead of revelation.
Rereading Brueggemann's book, I can see that I've got to give you more of it than I'd originally planned on, and it's a pleasure to do it.
So, to continue on with the passage about the expanded narrative:
The expanded narrative is a collection of all the ways in which the primal narrative has been perceived and handled. So with the other themes in the credo of Israel:
The assertion of deliverance from Egypt [Deuteronomy, 6:21-22, 26:6-8. Joshua 24:5-7) is expanded into the fulsome tory of Exodus 1-15.
The memory of wilderness sojourn is now extended into Exodus 16-18, Numbers 10-24.
The affirmation of the gift of the land is elaborated in Joshua 1-12.
The brief confessional statement has become a longer statement with many curious components, each of which asserts Israel's basic faith. Some scholars have called the extended form an epic derived from the credo.
In the New Testament, the primal narrative has been extended to become the whole gospel narrative of the birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection ascension of Jesus. The primal narrative focuses rather exclusively on the last events and the fuller gospel narrative is fulfilled out of memories of his life and ministry. But even that is not mere biography. It consists rather of memories seen through the prism of the dominant theme of crucifixion and resurrection, so that many stores in the gospels are episodes where, by Jesus' presence, action and words, a deathly situation was turned to life (cf. Mark 5: 24-34. Luke 7:36-50, Luke 19:1-10). Thus for an insider, even these narratives, seemingly removed from the primal narrative, do present the same faith. The narratives of the Hexateuch (Genesis - Joshua) and the gospels embody many attempts by many persons and groups over a long period of time to define the basic credo-kerygma, given their particular understandings.
* For the record, and because I've come to expect to be misrepresented, I'm no Calvinist, I'm not even a proper Western Christian, anymore, having found the universalist tradition of Gregory of Nyssa and other Orthodox fathers and his sister, Macrina The Younger, to be more convincing than the Western darkness and gloom growing out of Augustine.
Though, I have realized that universalism is, actually, a kind of predestinarianism. Only instead of some people being predestined to spend eternity in hell, all people, or in my take on it, all creatures are predestined to be reconciled with God. I think God can wait us all out and win us all over no matter how resistant we might be for how many ages.
Atheist materialism is also predestinarian of an even darker form than Calvin is maligned for holding to, they figure we're all predestined to obliteration and, in the process, they have to reduce us to total insignificance in the here and now to make it work.
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