The Bible, stories and method

If stories invite and engage us, sometimes even unconsciously, do we really need to go through a whole process of interpreting the text? Can’t one just read the story and get to the message? Do we really need a method to understand biblical stories?

Maybe I should start by saying that there is no one method to interpret stories but multiple methods. For the beginner it might be best to come to grips with a (good) method to interpret a text. Once one is familiar with that method one can take on others and start to integrate different methods. We should also keep in mind that method is not the purpose but a means to a purpose – a tool to be used in order to understand a text.

Good methodology helps us to consider different aspects of a text and help us look at the text from different angles. Good methodology, well applied and used, safeguard the text and the reader from the honest reader’s presuppositions. By an honest reader, I mean a reader who knows and acknowledges his/her presuppositions and are willing to submit it to the text. An honest reader will allow the biblical text to change his/her presuppositions in the light of the text and not the other way round. An honest reader fine-tunes his ears to the message of the text. He/she will consider as many aspects of a text as necessary in order to let the text speak, putting aside, as far as possible, his/her own ideas of or about the text.

This becomes part of a process more than a method. Waltke (2001, p. 33) puts it well:

The task of the Bible student is to discern the rules employed in a biblical text as evidenced by that text. This task necessarily involves a heuristic spiral. One approaches the text with ideas about its techniques and principals, which the text then proves or disproves. Thus begins the dialogue with the text that leads the careful listener to learn how the text communicates.

Methods are the systemised way of understanding how things work and/or can be done. Literary methods, develop by scholars who studies literature in order to understand how it works, helps the reader to understand the rules by which different texts functions – how they work. Understanding how stories work and systematically working through different aspects of a story, enables the reader to come to a better understanding of the story at hand. By working through a story methodologically, we consider different aspects of what the story is about and how the author wanted to communicate his message.

As Walkte shows, it is not about methodologism but about a dialogue with a particular text. Different text functions differently. The student needs to establish which of the verity of tools in his toolbox would work best to understand a text. By carefully applying first this than that tool, knowing how to use each, he/she learn how to let the text speak and what the text wants to say – coming to know God’s voice and heart behind that of the author.

Waltke, B. K. (2001). Genesis: a Commentary. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan.