Bibliotheca Sacra 147
(Jan. 1990) 3-15.
Copyright
© 1990 by
The Bible
as Literature
Part 1 (of 4 parts):
"Words of Delight": The Bible as
Literature
Leland Ryken
Professor of English
Evangelicals are witnessing a paradigm shift in
how biblical
scholars study and discuss the Bible. This shift
involves not only a
growing awareness that much of the Bible is
literature but also a
tendency to use the methods of literary criticism
when analyzing the
Bible. Evangelicals should participate in this
movement, which
holds immense promise but which to date has been
dominated by
nonevangelicals. What is required is
not only a receptivity to a lit-
erary approach but also an
awareness of what constitutes a genuinely
literary approach.
Interest in a Literary Approach to the Bible
New
winds are blowing in biblical studies. The most immediate
evidence is the titles of new books. Though
titles like the following
are still a minority, they are increasingly common:
Matthew as
Story;1 Irony in
the Fourth Gospel;2 Narrative
Art and Poetry in the
Books of Samuel;3 The Literary Guide to the Bible.4 Or consider the
1 J. D. Kingsbury, Matthew as Story (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).
2 Paul D. Duke, Irony in the Fourth Gospel (Atlanta:
John Knox Press, 1985).
3 J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative
Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, 2 vols. (
NH:
Van Gorcum, 1981,1986).
4 Robert Alter and Frank
Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
3
4 Bibliotheca
Sacra / January-March 1990
following table of contents from a recent
commentary on the Gospel of
John:
Narrator and Point of View; Narrative Time; Plot; Charac-
ters; Implicit Commentary;
The Implied Reader.
Even more telling, perhaps, is the way in which
literary terms
are now smuggled into titles where they seem to
have been dragged
in gratuitously: Call to Discipleship: A Literary Study of Mark's
Gospel;5 The Christocentric
Literary Structure of the Fourth Gospel. 6
Feminist
studies of the Bible typically advertise themselves as a
literary approach. Some other commentaries whose
titles promise a
literary approach in fact turn out to follow the
familiar contours of
conventional Bible commentaries.
Titles such as those mentioned
above point to a scholarly fad that will be a
dominant influence on
biblical scholarship for the foreseeable future.
In liberal scholar-
ship it is already replacing the long-standing
obsession with tracing
supposed stages of composition in a biblical
text.
The movement toward literary approaches to the
Bible began
two decades ago in high school and college English
departments. In
1975
a survey by the National Council of Teachers of English dis-
closed that courses in the Bible as literature ranked
in the top 10 of
180
commonly offered high school English courses. In the past
decade scholarly articles on the Bible have appeared
in the stan-
dard literary journals. The
most influential literary critic of this
century, Northrop Frye, gave impetus to the
movement by saying
that "the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the
teaching of litera-
ture. It should be taught so
early and so thoroughly that it sinks
straight to the bottom of the mind, where
everything that comes
along later can settle on it.... The Bible ... should
be the basis of
literary training."7
While Frye's vision was never fully realized,
the Bible is now
part of the literary canon that college teachers of
literature teach in
their courses and about which they write in their
scholarly journals.
The
most dramatic evidence of this was the appearance of the book
pretentiously titled The Literary Guide to the Bible. Despite
its
weak content, this book was reviewed in all the
leading sources, was
selected by a book club, and made its way into
ordinary bookstores.
As
so often in life, symbolic truth proved more important than the
reality behind it.
5 Augustine Stock, Call to Discipleship: A Literary Study of Mark's
Gospel
(Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1982).
6
George
Mlakuzhyil, The Christocentric Literary Structure of the Fourth Gospel
(Rome: Editrice Pontificio Instituto Biblico, 1987).
7 Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (
Press,
1964), pp. 110-11.
"Words of
Delight": The Bible as Literature 5
The interest in the Bible by literary scholars
sparked a similar
interest among liberal biblical scholars at a
time when several
decades of cutting and pasting the biblical text
had left scholars
feeling that the possibilities of that approach
had been exhausted.
The
infusion of a literary approach into this larger world of biblical
scholarship has been overwhelmingly positive. It has
led scholars
to focus on the biblical text instead of escaping
from it as quickly as
possible. Scholars have shown a new willingness
to accept the bibli-
cal text as they now find it instead of undertaking
textual excava-
tions into the supposed
layers of composition. And they have at last
been content to treat texts as unified wholes
instead of cutting them
into a patchwork of fragments.
But what about
evangelical biblical scholars? I first became in-
terested in the literary
analysis of the Bible two decades ago. When
I
taught my first course on the subject and subsequently wrote my first
book on it, virtually all the help from published
sources came from
liberal biblical scholars. It was a rarity to
find an evangelical who
said anything about the literary dimension of the
Bible. Today
there is a large body of literary commentary on the
Bible, but little
of it comes from evangelical scholars.
Yet the promise of this approach is immense.
Evangelical bibli-
cal scholarship is standing at an important
crossroads. It can con-
tinue to produce the type of
theologically and apologetically ori-
ented biblical material that
it has produced for the past century, or
it can enter an open door to new and different
emphases in handling
the Bible. The burden of this article is to
encourage evangelical
teachers and preachers of the Bible to believe
that a literary ap-
proach is something that
deserves their participation.
Obstacles Discouraging
a Literary Approach to the Bible
Obstacles exist, however, that may prevent such
participation
by evangelicals. Contentment with the status quo
is one of these ob-
stacles. After all, to adopt a
literary approach to the Bible is to en-
counter the unfamiliar. Abandoning the familiar
for the unknown in-
volves risk and requires the
humility (and sometimes even the hu-
miliation) of adopting the
position of a beginner. But of course the
person who stays with the familiar misses the
exhilaration that
comes from discovering how to do something better
than he or she has
done it before. Furthermore the literary approach to
the Bible is
more familiar than the uninitiated might think. Good
biblical ex-
positors and preachers
intuitively practice an incipient literary crit-
icism on the biblical text.
But their efforts in that direction could be
strengthened by being more conscious
and systematic, and by being
better informed by the methods and theory of literary
criticism.
6 Bibliotheca
Sacra / January-March 1990
To those who have inquired into literary
approaches to the
Bible,
other obstacles appear formidable. One is the sheer confusion
of techniques that fall under the rubric of
"literary criticism." Un-
fortunately that discipline is in disarray; in fact
it is an embarrass-
ment to one who is part of
that discipline. The prevailing fashions
in literary criticism are ideologically based.
Unfortunately those
ideologies are generally uncongenial to evangelical
Christians.
They
include philosophic nihilism or skepticism, Marxism, and mil-
itant feminism. Iconoclasm
toward traditional interpretations of
literary texts dominates published scholarship,
with the methods
of deconstruction serving as the handy demolition
tool for those who
disdain the truth and beauty that readers have
found in literature
through the ages.
The chaotic state of current literary criticism
should not prevent
biblical expositors from approaching the Bible as
literature. For one
thing biblical scholars at large are as guilty as
literary critics are of
practices that are uncongenial to an evangelical
viewpoint. In the
standard journals on biblical scholarship there
is the same range of
belief and unbelief, the same preponderance of
hostility to an evan-
gelical view of the Bible, and
the same incidence of specialized vo-
cabulary and esoteric methods
encountered in literary journals. In
both cases reliable guides are needed to help weed
out the aberra-
tions, but it is unwarranted
to refuse to enter the field simply because
there is much that is uncongenial. Some of the
destructive current
trends in literary criticism began with biblical
scholars and
philosophers, not with literary
scholars.
A third obstacle that prevents evangelicals from
warming to the
literary approach to the Bible is common
misconceptions of what con-
stitutes literature. Foremost
among these is that literature is neces-
sarily fictional. It seemed
for a time that the equation of literature
and fiction had dropped out of circulation, but it
has been resurrected
by leading literary critics. They are at pains to
signal that they re-
gard the narratives of the
Bible as at least partly fictional and unre-
liable as factual history. Yet these discussions are
not really liter-
ary in nature. They are
actually a Johnny-come-lately version of the
debate over historicity that has long raged among
biblical scholars.
The
question of fictionality in the Bible belongs to
historical schol-
arship, not literary
criticism. The very literary critics who make
pronouncements about the fictionality of biblical narrative would not
think of conducting similar arguments when they
discuss extrabibli-
cal literature. If one were to reject a literary
approach because some
literary critics question the historicity of the
Bible, he on the same
logic would have to reject a historical approach,
since liberal bibli-
cal scholars also question the accuracy of the
Bible's history.
The fear that a literary approach to the Bible
requires an ac-
"Words of Delight": The
Bible as Literature
7
ceptance of the fictionality of biblical narrative is based on a mis-
conception about literature. Fictionality,
though common in litera-
ture, is not an essential
ingredient of literature. The properties that
make a text literary are unaffected by the
historicity or fictionality
of the material. A literary approach depends on a
writer's selectiv-
ity and molding of the
material, regardless of whether the details
actually happened or are made up.
Nor does the presence of artifice and convention
in a biblical text
imply fictionality. By way
of analogy, consider the conventions sur-
rounding the live television sports report. In
this television genre
the reporter is filmed with a sports arena in the
background. During
the course of the report the reporter either
interviews an athlete or
is momentarily replaced by a film clip of sports
action. At the end of
the report, the reporter stares into the camera and
utters a catchy,
impressive-sounding one-liner. The artifice
of such conventions is
obvious. Yet they do not undermine the
factuality of the report it-
self. There is an unwarranted assumption in some
quarters that the
presence of literary conventions and artifice in
the Bible signals that
the content is fictional rather than factual.
A final obstacle to the literary approach to the
Bible is a fear
that such an approach means only a literary
approach, devoid of
the special religious belief and authority that
Christians associate
with the Bible. C. S. Lewis fueled this skepticism.
The Bible, he
said in an oft-quoted statement, "is not merely
a sacred book but a
book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that
it does not invite,
it excludes or repels, the merely aesthetic
approach."8 Elsewhere he
observed that "those who talk of reading the
Bible 'as literature'
sometimes mean, I think, reading it without
attending to the main
thing it is about."9 Yet the context
in which Lewis made these com-
ments shows that his
objections concerned an abuse of the literary
approach, not the approach itself. In fact Lewis
followed one of the
quoted passages with the following defense of a literary
approach:
"There
is a ... sense in which the Bible, since it is after all litera-
ture, cannot properly be
read except as literature; and the different
parts of it as the different sorts of literature they
are."10
To sum up, it would be tragic if evangelical
scholars and preach-
ers allowed themselves to
be deterred from a literary approach to
the Bible because of objections that turn out to be
fallacies. One can
8 C. S. Lewis, The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version
(
Fortress
Press, 1967), p. 33.
9 C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (
1958),
pp. 2-3.
10 Ibid.,
p. 3.
8 Bibliotheca
Sacra / January-March 1990
take a literary approach without getting sidetracked
by exotic and
specialized critical approaches. To view the Bible
as literature
does not require one to regard it as fictional or to
compromise one's
view of its special religious authority.
Characteristics of a
Literary Approach to the Bible
What does it mean to read and study and preach
the Bible as
literature? If literary criticism presented a
united voice, it would be
easy to answer that question. But as already
indicated, literary crit-
icism itself is today in a
state of transition and disarray. With so
many scholars clamoring to climb aboard the
Bible-as-literature
bandwagon, and with so many books and articles
claiming to be a lit-
erary approach to the Bible,
we obviously need criteria by which to
assess the claims.
People who wish to undertake a literary study of
the Bible can
safely disregard much that is currently going on in
the world of spe-
cialized literary criticism.
They need to consider traditional liter-
ary criticism. A literary
scholar asserted that "what biblical schol-
ars need to hear most from
literary critics is that old-fashioned crit-
ical concepts of plot,
character, setting, point of view and diction may
be more useful than more glamorous and
sophisticated theories."11
What most characterizes traditional literary
criticism? The
answer is that genre does, provided it is understood
that literature
itself is a genre. That is, works that are classified
as literature
have identifiable traits that set them off from
other kinds of writ-
ing, just as specific
genres like narrative and poetry have identifying
traits. Evangelicals should be skeptical of any
approach that
claims to be literary if it fails to define what makes
a text literary.
The
literary properties of a text extend to both content and technique.
At the level of content, the differentia of
literature is its presen-
tation of human experience, as
distinct from the conveying of infor-
mation, facts, or
propositions. Literature is incarnational. It enacts
rather than states. Instead of giving abstract
propositions about
virtue or vice, for example, literature presents
stories of good or evil
characters in action. Literature gives the example
instead of the
precept, or combines the example with the
precept. The knowledge
that literature imparts consists of living through
an experience or (in
the case of poetry) picturing a series of images.
The language of lit-
erature is prevailingly
concrete rather than abstract. The fifth com-
mandment states propositionally,
"You shall not murder." The story
11 John W. Sider, "Nurturing Our Nurse: Literary Scholars and
Biblical Exegesis,"
Christianity and
Literature
32 (1982): 19-20.
"Words of
Delight": The Bible as Literature 9
of Cain and Abel incarnates that same truth,
without, it might be
noted, using the abstraction "murder" or a
command that people
should refrain from it.
Several important corollaries follow from the incarnational na-
ture of literature. Because
the aim of a literary text is to recreate an
experience rather than develop a logical argument
in essay fashion,
the first item on the agenda for the reader or
expositor is to relive
the text as vividly and concretely as possible. A
literary text seeks
to encompass its reader in a whole world of the
imagination, not to
point beyond itself as quickly and transparently as
possible to a body
of information.
Furthermore the fact that a literary text
embodies an experience
means that the whole story or the whole poem is the
meaning.
There
is something irreducible about a literary text. The generaliza-
tions made about it are never
an adequate substitute for the meanings
that the work itself communicates. Certainly a set
of propositions
cannot be said to convey the full meaning of a
literary text. Nor must
a reader express the content of a story or poem
in the form of a propo-
sition before he or she can be
said to have grasped its meaning. If
readers recognize
the neighborly behavior of the good Samaritan,
for example, they have grasped the experiential
truth of Jesus'
parable.
The literary impulse to incarnate human experience
or reality
also has implications for how Bible students view
the truth that the
Bible
communicates. For most people, truth is synonymous with
ideas that are true rather than false. But the
truthfulness that lit-
erature imparts is a whole
further type of truth, namely, truthful-
ness to reality or to human experience. The story of
the Fall in Gene-
sis 3, for example, is a truthful portrayal of such
human experiences
as temptation, guilt, rationalization of sin, fear
of discovery, shame,
alienation, and irremediable loss.
The ability to see truthfulness to reality in
the Bible is rendered
easy because of a further trait of literature-the
fact that it embod-
ies universal human
experience. History tells what happened,
while literature tells what happens-what is true for all people at
all times. This premise underlies a good sermon or
Bible study,
which assumes the continuing relevance of the
experiences portrayed
in the story or poem.
The Bible is more than a work of literature, but
it is not less. It
combines three impulses in a way that partly
accounts for its unique-
ness. These three impulses are theological,
historical, and literary.
Usually
one of these dominates a given passage, but not necessarily
to the exclusion of others. Thus claiming that
Genesis 3 tells how the
fall into sin happens
does not question that it also tells how the orig-
inal fall happened. Yet a touchstone that allows
readers to gauge
10 Bibliotheca
Sacra / January-March 1990
whether a text is literary is the degree to
which they can see univer-
sal human experience in it.
The content of literature is human experience,
presented as con-
cretely as possible. How much
of the Bible is literary by this crite-
rion of concrete embodiment
of human experience rather than ab-
stract argument? Realizing the
mixed nature of biblical writing, 80
percent is not an exaggeration. The implications
of this for preach-
ing and teaching the Bible
are immense. It should affect our selec-
tivity of passages for
teaching and preaching. There is no good rea-
son why preachers should gravitate so naturally and
consistently to
the abstract, expository (informational) parts of
the Bible, chiefly
the Epistles.
In response to a presentation I recently gave on
reading the
Psalms,
a pastor in the audience claimed that to practice what I had
suggested would be to unlearn what he had been
urged to do in semi-
nary. The homiletics teacher had in effect told his
students not to
preach from the Psalms because they are deficient in
propositional
content. Instead the students were encouraged to
preach from pas-
sages that had "meat," that is, the
Epistles. The preponderance of
literary writing in the Bible shows that God
trusted literature as a
medium for conveying truth, and it should serve as a
curb against ex-
cessive reliance on abstractly
theological passages in Bible teaching
and preaching.
Of course it is possible to choose literary
passages for exposition
and yet fail to treat them in a literary manner.
The commonest form
of this failure is to reduce literary texts to
abstract propositions. In-
stead of reliving a story, the prevailing tendency
among preachers is
to develop three generalizations and dip into the
biblical story to
lustrate them. The images in the Psalms are
reduced to a series of
propositions. The result is that
preachers and teachers and their lis-
teners have slipped into
thinking of the Bible as a theological out-
line with proof texts attached. Knowing that
literature is a concrete
embodiment of human experience can help people
interact with the
Bible
in terms of the kind of writing it really is.
If literature is definable partly by its
experiential content, it is
also characterized by its technique and forms. The
most common way
of defining literature is by its genres (literary
types). Through the
centuries, people have agreed that certain genres
(such as story, po-
etry, and drama) are
literary in nature. Other genres, such as histor-
ical chronicles, theological
treatises, and genealogies, are exposi-
tory in nature. Still others
fall into one category or the other, de-
pending on how the writer handles them. Letters,
sermons, and ora-
tions, for example, can move
in the direction of literature if they
display the ordinary elements of literature.
Every literary genre has its distinctive
features and conventions.
"Words of
Delight": The Bible as Literature 11
These should affect how a person reads and
interprets a biblical text.
Readers
and interpreters need to come to a given text with the right
expectations. If they do, they will
see more than they would other-
wise see, and they will avoid misreadings.
Literary genre is nothing
less than a "norm or expectation to guide the
reader in his encounter
with the text."12 An awareness of
genre can program one's reading of
a passage, giving it a familiar shape and
arranging the details into
an identifiable pattern.
A literary approach to the Bible will require
biblical scholars
and expositors to enlarge their list of genres and
let their knowledge
of how each genre works control what they do with
biblical passages
more thoroughly than they usually do. This will not
require a so-
phisticated set of critical tools.
In fact mastering the tools of liter-
ary analysis that are
taught in a typical high school or college lit-
erature course is the best
starting point, as my own books on the sub-
ject are designed to
suggest.13
As stated earlier, it is possible to be misled
into thinking that a
literary approach means adopting one of the
specialized critical
"schools" currently in vogue. There is something far
more basic (and
far more productive of insights into biblical
texts) that undergirds a
literary approach, regardless of the specific
critical school to which
a critic belongs. The deep structure of literary
criticism includes an
awareness of how stories and poems work, how
metaphor and other
figurative language communicates, and an
appreciation for the
artistry of an utterance. It would be lamentable
if in adopting eso-
teric critical approaches,
the essence of a literary approach were
missed. Such an approach will be eclectic in the sense
of using what-
ever tools of analysis yield the most insight into
the Bible, what-
ever "school" of criticism they belong to.
Regardless of the genre in which a given work is
written, litera-
ture is identifiable by its
special resources of language. Reliance on
these can occur in texts that we would not consider
to be primarily
literary, and wherever they appear they require
literary analysis.
A
discourse becomes literary, for example, when a writer exploits
such resources of language as metaphor, simile,
allusion, pun, para-
dox, and irony. These are
the very essence of poetry, but in the Bible
they appear everywhere, not just in the poetry. This
is why, inci-
12 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (
1975),
p. 136.
13
These
books include How to Read the Bible as
Literature (
van Publishing House, 1984) and three books
published by Baker Book House: Words
of Delight: A Literary Introduction to the Bible (1987); Words of Life: A Literary In-
troduction to the New Testament (1987); and Effective
Bible Teaching (with Jim Wil-
hoit; 1988).
12 Bibliotheca
Sacra / January-March 1990
dentally, a literary approach is necessary
throughout the Bible and
not just in the predominantly literary parts.
A literary approach to the Bible is preoccupied
with literary
form. In any written discourse, meaning is
communicated through
form. The concept of form should be construed very
broadly in this
context. It includes anything that touches on how a writer has ex-
pressed the content of an utterance. Everything
that gets communi-
cated does so through form,
beginning with language itself.
While this is true for all forms of writing, it
is especially cru-
cial for literature.
Literature has its own forms and techniques, and
these tend to be more complex and subtle and indirect
than those of
ordinary discourse. Stories, for example,
communicate their meaning
through character, setting, and action. To
understand a story, a read-
er must first interact
with the form, that is, the characters, settings,
and events. Poetry conveys its meanings through
figurative language
and concrete images. It is therefore impossible to
determine what a
poem says without first encountering the form
(metaphor, simile, im-
age, etc.).
The literary critic's preoccupation with the how of biblical
writing is not frivolous. It is evidence of an
artistic delight in verbal
beauty and craftsmanship, but it is also part of an
attempt to under-
stand what
the Bible says. In a literary text it is impossible to sepa-
rate what is said from how it is said, content from
form.
The
aesthetic dimension of a literary approach to the Bible is
also important. Literary criticism is capable of
showing that the
Bible
is an interesting rather than a dull book, and a book that is
beautiful as well as truthful. There is as much
artistry and crafts-
manship in the Bible as in any
other anthology of literature, as re-
cent literary approaches have abundantly shown.
To sum up, a literary approach to the Bible
begins and ends with
an awareness of what makes a text literary. An
adequate grasp of
this will tend to generate its own methods of
analysis. Obviously a
text is best approached in terms of the kind of
writing it really is. A
literary approach will yield its best results
only if the text being
analyzed is literary. In recent years some
scholars have applied
high-powered literary methods to
biblical texts that are not pri-
marily literary in nature. The
results have been decidedly meager,
despite all the appearance of a literary
approach. Therefore
whether a piece of analysis is literary is
determined partly by what
biblical text the writer has chosen to discuss.
Benefits of a Literary
Approach to the Bible
What advantages does a literary approach offer
to biblical ex-
positors? First, it provides an
improved methodology for interacting