How Does Narrative Teach Theology and Ethics?

And the war and the poverty when I was there, especially. Now, the immigration issue. So you have to engage those real life issues. And so that's how it all came together years ago.

It's a fundamentally Trinitarian creed and then at the end, there are a few little things added beyond the trinity to kind of round out the confession. But there is not a word in the entire creed that has an ethical element to it. It's strictly this is who I confess God to be.

And the splinters are based on doctrinal differences. I mean, so it's part of the DNA. And I think biblically though, it's not like that. I mean the Old Testament, the prophets, and I can give you verses if you wanted, but I mean Jesus himself – I mean it's about how will they know that you love me? Because you obey me. I mean so the idea of wedding obedience and an ethical life, not only individual, which is a whole nother discussion.

It isn't covered. Another anecdote that you'll identify with, because obviously we both went here to seminary, is when I went through my seminary training, we were in the midst of coming out of the Vietnam War. But I never had a class that ethically discussed what the Bible talked about war.

And I knew a family who put their teenage sons up for adoption as a way of getting them out. So okay, those are your four options and so he goes, "Profe," as we would say in Spanish, "what do I tell my youth group?" Okay, just think about –

So let's start there. Let's assume that someone walks up to you and says, "I wanna think about the Bible ethically. Where do I start?" This isn't just a case of “cherry picking” verses.

And so let me give you an example. For instance, if we're talking about poverty, well, there are stories in the Bible about poor people and how they suffer and the various reasons they suffer, whether it's famine, or drought, or war. But this will be like the Pentateuchal narratives, for instance, or some of the narratives in Samuel, Kings. But then what you get, for instance, is legislation dealing with poverty. So we need to get to that point, you see, where you say, "We're not just gonna have an ethnical discussion about poverty. We're gonna talk about what are some legislative solutions to this?"

In fact, the Old Testament has this. Can the legislative piece of the Bible help us? Then we would look at the wisdom literature, Proverbs, where you talk about the importance of personal ethical decision making and how it impinges on your economic life and stewardship. And then I would go to the Prophets and talk about a prophetic voice into the systems and into the structures. And so what you're seeing is a full orbed – and this is all just Old Testament.

And this of course undercuts your ability to build this canonical vision that you're talking about. So let's talk a little bit about how does narrative teach? Does it give portraits of the way in which life is engaged that we're supposed to reflect upon and learn from? How does narrative do it for us?

And you can identify with the situation. But the other thing that's interesting is that even secular theory recognizes that what novels do is engage you in the decision making process. It's kind of like if you're watching a movie and a movie's like a motion picture narrative.

And you also see the good and the bad consequences of the choices that the characters are making. So the reading exercise is actually an exercise in ethics. So literary theory sees this. What we need to do is bring this into the biblical discussion more and more because what happens, and even though is this an exegete, sometimes exegetes are bad readers. They're good. They're good engineers.

They're used to the visual movie. But they actually just stop and read, so when I teach my Old Testament narrative sections, a lot of it is very self-consciously acting it out, very self-consciously raising my voice or speaking in a whisper, you see? And taking on the different characters. And they begin to get into it. And they'll say to me, "I've never seen it this way." It's a shame because they've been taught to read it for principles, not to engage it as literature.

They're in some ways more like a – they're somewhat more like the things you do see in Epistles, where the challenge of the prophet is kind of in your face. You have to be pretty blind to miss it sometimes. Whereas narrative tends to be a little more subtle and a little harder to get your hands around.

But if you keep reading the narrative, this triggers the revenge of Absalom, the rebellion by Absalom. I mean everything starts to unravel, you see? So in the narrative, the narrative is telling you this is horrible because look at all the things that it generated. But the students want –

Here's the promise made to Israel. And yeah, Abraham took a little bit of a journey, and it took a while and that kind of thing, but eventually worked its way there and the promise was planted. And that's about all you get out of it. But you were trying to get us to think through if I can say it this way, where Abraham was, where his location was, what he was is God took him through what he went through and how that can be a lesson for us. Can you illustrate that and elaborate that for us for a little?

And they begin to make the trek to Egypt because there's food. You have the Nile. So you'll have water, which means you have harvest, which means there is food to eat. And so Egypt was always having to deal with people trying to come in for food. And so we know from archaeology they'd set up a series of forts along their eastern frontier to help monitor the movement. So it's very human, I mean, what's going on. Nothing new on that.

But what is driving them to go there is hunger. And she's willing to go through with it for the sake of the family. Now, it's very wise. I didn't get into this this morning because I was watching the clock, but as the brother, if anyone wanted Sarai, they would have to ask the brother for permission to marry her. So you could see where at the same time he is protecting her and they're just pushing whatever bad thing happens down the road a little bit.

But I was trying to tell people this morning is that what you see is Abram is hungry, and this is why people move, because they're hungry. And if it means lying to get across a border to feed your family, you're willing to do it, and she's willing to put herself at risk sexually, for being very blunt, for the sake of the family, okay? Now, so you're reading this as an immigrant story, and I work a lot with immigration, as you know, so I've heard these stories. And they're kind of like this, you know, where they lie to get across.

But I know when I went to seminary, the ethical debate was, was what Abram actually said a lie? And so there was all this kind of maneuvering to get Abram off the hook for not actually lying. Or if he did, it wasn't really a bad a lie, right? So what you can see is though it is echoing immigrant stories, when I got taught, it was all about “is it a lie?”

And so when you assemble a topic as a whole, what you see is you'll see some passages that are kind of to one side of the question and other passages that are to the other side of the question. And the ethical reflection the Bible requires is how do we relate all these bits to one another, as opposed to that's my verse that tells me what to do. You think that's a, in a generic, hermeneutical way, a better way to think about how we approach the issue of ethics?

I teach a course on reading the Old Testament from the majority world (and a lot of it has to do with ethical things) but my opening exercise, the first day of class, is looking at the reading of the Old Testament in Nazi Germany. And it's a great exercise because they're just – it just makes it so stark. I've gotta stay close to the microphone.

So not only is it a reading exercise in the ivory tower, see, now it becomes a reading exercise of counting the cost of life, which ultimately is where ethics will take you. You've gotta make choices on slavery, on immigration, on women's suffrage, abortion, and now the choices you make and how you read actually may require a cost. And that's something most readers haven't thought about because sometimes the readers, the comfortable suburbanite, where he's never had to – or he or she's never had to gauge the cost of reading, you see. But in ethical issues, ultimately at some time, rather, there's a cost to reading the way you read.

But the example I like to raise is a passage in Luke. It's the passage where John the Baptist says to the soldier, "Don't take advantage of the person, and be comfortable with your wage." And in a culture where generally the military is, here in the States, generally respected and viewed positively, you don't deal with a lot of corruption, you don't deal with a lot of abuse. I mean it's there, but it's not the dominant feature of what you think about in the context of the military.

And then going to a country where the issue of the military and how they handle people is very much an issue of integrity and those are kind of very much on the table, all of a sudden I realized if I preach this passage in Dallas, Texas, people in the pew aren't nervous. They get it. They sort of get it. “Oh yeah, it's a nice text.” If I preach that passage in certain parts on Guatemala, my life could be at stake. And so just the sheer movement of location changes what's happening with that passage.

And we sometimes don't get that. We sometimes read our text. We sometimes read the biblical text as if the biblical text is located in the same suburban environment that we live in as opposed to being in the context of a life that the text was actually addressing. And that makes a big difference.

And I say to my students, "Look. If your theology can work in the streets of Damascus today, then let's just go home. If it works in your suburban university setting, and you go to your office and you put up your computer, and then you go to the cafeteria for lunch and, you go home and read your books and write your reviews, okay. That's Disney World. Beirut and Damascus, that's life. Guatemala City, that's life."

And what we find in the scriptures is that's the life they're engaging. It's the life in the Old Testament where war is part of existence, where famine and drought is regular, where disease is -no doctors. So the harsh edges of life is what is assumed, whereas for us it's the exception. And if we begin to look at the Bible that way, I think it'll be much more powerful than what we sometimes do to minimize its power.