Art Is Harder Than Reporting

LISTENING TO THE INTERVIEW with Walter Brueggemann again to get that excerpt used here the other day, I noticed so much in it that I'm sure I didn't get when I first listened to it several years back.  One of the things he pointed out was how the historical-critical method of dealing with scripture trying to pin down what's left of "authenticity" once they've dissected it and figured out "who" wrote what lines and even parts of lines as well as the fideistic practice of the "evangelical" churches missed an important fact about the scripture, that it's not so much a denotative text in which set meanings are set out as in academic discourse, it is an artistic literature that is so rich in content, often dealing with things that it's impossible to grasp in that way and pin down.  It's poetry which not only has different goals but is at such a different way to use language which demands expansion in the thoughts and minds of those who hear and read it.

Poetry, at least good poetry, does that.  It presents images and implications that must be understood through the evocation of the life experience and understanding of its readers in ways that are more demanding than the same background to expository writing and even scientific and mathematical description.  Far from being slight and airy-fairy, good poetry is far more demanding of the readers and listeners.  The idea that the standards, practices and methods of science and the academic pretense that other, less focused and reductionist topics of study can practice those to come to the same kind of fixed, limited, reliable knowledge are more rigorous than poetry strikes me as being a financial issue, that those topics can get you wealth while poetry will get you a life.  As I had to tell many people, compared to playing Beethoven, calculus is easy. Which is relevant to what is said in the interview.  And the Bible is a lot harder than Beethoven.

The sometimes heard snark of sci-guys like Sagan or Krauss or the pseudo-sci guys like Pinker ask why there isn't any scientific knowledge in the Bible, ignoring or forgetting that there is, actually, content which scientists get really pissed off about when science mirrors it.  Such as the one that's often brought up, the Big Bang and the materialist-atheist-scientistic rejection of that science until they couldn't and, in some cases, even after that.  But the fact is that's not what those who came up with the individual books were focused on.  

You may as well reject any other academic field that doesn't give you an answer to basic physics or astronomy texts.  When the author(s) of the first eleven or so verses in Genesis came up with that, they weren't doing physics, they weren't publishing a description of the physics of the it, they were telling us something about Creation, that it was good, later, that People's use of and experience of what's wrong with it it came from us, not from Creation and God.  Mixed into that poetic imagery was stuff we don't find especially useful for understanding, the talking snake, but that's poetry for you.  There's junk in Lucretius that's not especially useful to modern consideration and there's really no more science in it, just as there isn't in much of the ancient lit that is more congenial to post-WWII sci-guy atheists and religion haters but you never hear them challenge that.  Heck, there are masses of late 18th-19th century romantic and racist crap in much of the scientific literature and they haven't done much to get rid of that.  Even when it has gotten millions of People killed.  Especially within biology and its allied sciences and the pseudo-sciences that latched onto it such as psychology.

I may get round to expanding on that because I'm toying with the idea of going through that interview in my typical way because that's only one of the issues that is worth going through for a week or a month in it.  Though many others online would be as good I think the back and forth between the two hosts and Walter Brueggemann adds to the long informed observations of Brueggemann in a way that supplements even his excellent sermons and lectures which I've found so important.