Brueggemann, in his book The Creative Word, focuses on the Torah as he declares the following five beliefs about story.
Story is concrete
Biblical stories are about particular persons in particular times and places.
Story is open-ended in its telling
Brueggemann believes that the community of Israel was not interested in a static meaning or flat memories for Israel’s new generation. Rather, she was concerned about creating a context, evoking a perception, forming a frame of reference that went beyond and did not depend on any particular version or nuance of any particular narrative. The storyteller requires fidelity, however, by knowing the boundaries of form and plot and characters. (Walter Brueggemann, The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 23) Brueggemann appears to be saying that the boundaries are literary and he remains unclear about the historical.
Narratives demonstrate and illustrate God’s acts among men. (Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 90-91). Why do we find things in narratives that are not there? Here are some possible reasons: First, we wrongly expect that everything in Scripture applies directly to each part of our lives. Second, we are desperate for information from God that will help us through some problem or situation. Third, we are impatient and want answers now from a specific verse in a specific chapter in a specific book in Scripture.
Fee and Stuart suggest that being selective by combining verses contextually that are not connected naturally and allegorizing is not helpful. (Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible… 102-106). The authors suggest: First, do not practice selectivity: Do not pick and choose specific words and phrases to concentrate on while ignoring the overall context of the passage. Second, Do not combine verses contextually not connected: Do not combine a verse from here and a verse from there and a part of a verse from yet a third place and place them together as God’s word for a situation.
The problem of “selectivity†is addressed by Richard Hays under the concept of intertextuality, which is the “imbedding of fragments of an earlier text within a later one….†(Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 14). Kent Yinger sees “intertextual play†found in “all strata of the OT†which helps us have a “better understanding†of concepts like “grace and works†in the New Testament. (Kent L. Yinger, Paul, Judaism, and Judgment according to Deeds (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series), (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY), 19.) What Paul and others may be doing when they quote a text from the Old Testament (remember, the Old Testament was not yet canonized and certainly not versified at this time in history) is simply drawing attention to the whole story from which the text being quoted is. A present analogy would be the use of “keywords†in a search engine such as Google to find the larger context in which those words are recorded. It just might be that we have taken our propensity to prooftext and projected it back on Paul and other writers of the New Testament.
In order to understand what narratives are and how to read them, it is helpful to observe what narratives are not. Fee and Stuart present a summary: (Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 92-93). First, they are not stories about people who lived in an ancient age. They are stories about what God did to and through these people. Second, they are not stories filled with allegory or hidden meaning. Third, they are not always direct in their teaching. Fourth, they do not always have a specific moral of their own.
Next, they present some targets to shoot at when reading narratives. (Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible…, 106). First, they do not directly teach a doctrine. They illustrate doctrine that is taught elsewhere in Scripture. Second, they record what happened, not what should or could have happened; therefore, not every narrative has a moral. Third, the actions of the characters in the narratives are not necessarily the correct actions to imitate. Most characters are not hero models to follow. Fourth, the story does not usually tell us if the actions were good or bad. We are left to make up our minds based on what God has taught in the teaching parts of Scripture. Fifth, these stories are incomplete and selective. Not every detail or even all needed details are given. What does appear in the story is what the inspired author thought important for the reader to know. More
Fee and Stuart present a metaphor of a three-story house. I have modified it to a two-story metaphor with a foundation/substratum (does that make me a foundationalist?). What Fee and Stuart call the first floor; I call the house foundation or substratum.
Think of Old Testament narratives as a two-story (no pun intended) building. The house has a foundation that is the big picture of God’s acts in his world—creation, the fall and its effects, sin and its power, redemption, and the coming of the Kingdom in Jesus. This foundation is the overall Story of God’s salvation history of humankind. The first floor centers on Israel—the Old Testament people of God. Its Story begins in Genesis 11.27 with the call of Abraham. It continues with the promise to Abraham to give him a land and a people and the rise of a nation beginning with the Exodus; the giving of the covenant and the working out of that covenant in the life of Israel; the rise of the United Kingdom and the Divided Kingdom and their restoration after the exile. The second floor contains several hundred individual narratives. Each narrative on this floor goes to make up the whole of the narrative of the first floor, Israel’s history, and, finally, the foundation narrative, God’s EPIC Adventure. (Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 91-92).
We spend most of our time reading the stories on the second floor. To really grasp their intentional meaning, we must give due attention to the first floor story and the substratum of the house.
