I will remind you that the reason I'm posting these excerpts from Walter Brueggemann's The Bible Makes Sense is in reaction to the recently open Museum of the Bible and the reportedly narrow and anachronistically presented "meaning" of the Bible through it. Being raised a Catholic, which, though a biblical faith is not a bibliolatrous tradition, we never took the Scriptures in the same way described in the various accounts of the Museum. Whatever else can be said about it, it's not a Catholic way of viewing the Scriptures. I doubt it suffices for the Orthodox or Nestorian or even much of the Protestant points of view.
They say it costs about twenty-five bucks to get into the Bible Museum. If you want to go look at a bunch of stuff and listen to some high tech shows, apparently that's what your money will get you. If you want to engage with the Scriptures, spending the few dollars to get Brueggemann's book and a few others and going through them, reading the texts that he refers to and turn it into reality instead of a dead museum exhibit is a more biblical experience. Or read it from a library, give your 25 dollars to some poor person or to someone who won't pay it back. Though you'll probably want to read the book and refer to it more than once.
cont. The substance of these kernels of biblical faith ( credo, kerygma ) presents the essentials of all biblical faith. For Israel:
1) The promise made to our fathers in the midst of great precariousness.
2) God delivered Israel from slavery to freedom with a great show of power which defeated the greatest power of the time.
3) God led Israel in the wilderness a place of precarious pilgrimage, and there he nourished and sustained his people.
4) God brought Israel to the good land which he had promised.
For the early church, as Dodd has summarized:
1) The prophecies are fulfilled, and the New Age i inaugurated by the coming of Christ.
2) He was born of the seed of David.
3) He died according to the Scriptures, to deliver us out of the present evil age.
4) He was buried.
5) He rose on the third day according to the Scriptures.
6) He is exalted at the right hand of God, as son of God and Lord of the living and dead.
7) He will come again as Judge and Savior of human kind.
8) To this summary might be added, although Dodd did not do so, the outpouring of the spirit as te effect of Jesus' exaltation.
These two lists provide a summary of biblical faith in very broad outline and may provide us witha a way of understanding the strange ordering of the literature.
The Expanded Narrative
After understanding the primal narrative we may next speak of the expanded narrative. Obviously the biblical text now presents to us all kinds of materials which do not have the clarity or conciseness of the credo or kerygma. In the process of building the tradition, the primal narrative was expanded over a period of time in ways that seem to us not very careful or disciplined. Rather, they give the impression of being careless and disordered. The primal narratives have attracted to them all kinds of diverse material which may or may not be related to the themes of the primal narrative. But they have been pressed into relationship with the primal themes and into their service. That is, they have been brought into contact with this central story had have had their meanings changed by it. In reading this more extended material, it is helpful in each case to consider it as a more elaborate and complete presentation of the same theme found in the kernel, which means that this literature also is confessional and not reportorial in character.
And as an example of what that expansion of the primal narrative can mean, he relates it to the larger part of Genesis, the part we don't generally fight over in blog brawls (once you get past the typical atheist distortion and misreading of Abraham and Isaac).
Thus in the Old Testament, Genesis, chapters 12-50 the story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, is an extended presentation of the promise made to "my father who is a wandering Aramean." And in each unit of Gen. 12-50, we may look for the promise being kept tot he precarious ("wandering") one. For those who read as insiders, the central issue of these texts is whether God will keep his promise. The stories in their present form reflect doubt and uncertainty. They also reflect calculation and manipulation by persons who could not res on the promises but had a better way of their own. Often the stories agonize because God does not seem ready or able to keep his promise of giving a son; the next generation then must also bear the promise. Can the barren woman become the mother of the child of promise (Gen. 18: 1-15)? Can the younger son secure the promise which should have gone elsewhere (Gen 27)? Can the beloved son come out of the pit to power (Gen. 40-41)? These are all dimensions of the singe statement of the old credo.
If you don't have a Bible on hand, you can find it for free, all over the place online, in dozens and dozens of translations and in various editions. It's easier to look those up online than in paper and to compare different translations. I'm not well versed in which of those are considered closer to the original language edition so I have to look to see who approved what. If you've got an opinion on that, I'd welcome hearing it. I do have to say that reading the Books of Moses as translated by Everett Fox has been a vivid and wonderful experience.
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