Category: Online Resources

From “The Art of Reading Scripture”.

The church’s reading of Scripture has usually presupposed its narrative unity, that is, that the whole of the
Bible – or the Bible read as a whole – tells a coherent story. Any part of Scripture contributes to or illuminates in some way this one story, which is the story of God’s purpose for the world. If Scripture does indeed tell the
story of God’s purpose for the world, then we should certainly expect to find unity and coherence in it. But the
idea of reading Scripture as a unified narrative seems problematic from at least two very different perspectives: (1) that of biblical scholars for whom the great diversity of the biblical texts makes the claim of unity inconsistent with the nature of the Bible and (2) that of postmodern critics for whom a unified narrative would establish
Christianity as the oppressive metanarrative that historically it has very often been. This essay begins with
a section that responds mainly to the first perspective. The argument about the Bible is then interrupted by a critical consideration of the second perspective (the postmodern critique of metanarratives) in order to resume,
in the third section, a discussion of the biblical story with some conceptual tools provided by the postmodern approach.