This week in our DMin cohort we worked on a beginning abstract for the thesis that we will write. Below is the product of the work this week working on and area of the abstract called "Claims and Warrants." From the book The Craft of Research. 2nd Edition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 2003). 336 pages.
AUDIENCE
In addition to the academic audience, I will also address readers of Scripture who read it fissiparously.
PROBLEM
Readers of Scripture read it fissiparously. Antidote: Read Scripture's story as God’s metanarrative. I am studying Scripture as metanarrative because I want to discover how God's story may be put together in such a way so that it may serve as a replacement for readers for their fragmented (fissiparous) reading of Scripture in order to help my reader envision the complete story so that the reader may live in God’s metanarrative better.
CLAIMS
Although I acknowledge that the addition of chapters and verses causes readers of the text of Scripture to read it fragmentedly, they may be helpful in helping the reader find a passage of scripture quickly, or they may work as placeholders for the beginning and ending of a story, or they might even help point to other sections of the story.
I believe that Story is the design God picked to call us to our vocation: partnering with him in the redemption of his creation. His story originally came to us without the fragmented inserts of chapters and verses which often diverts the readers attention away from the overall story. The church lived 1500 years without these additions to the text. Statements of Faith are attempts at a brief systematic theology (systematitis) by breaking the Story into fragmented parts that are held up as "final" beliefs to which one is to ascribe, believing that it has captured all knowable truth on the subject visited. Pick up any Bible and note that they all are formatted in this late addition to the text. Finally, it seems to me that fragmented teaching produces fragmented believers who are anemic, listless, and weak with no sense of vocation as a follower of Jesus.
I claim that the best way for readers to understand the message of the Scriptures is to grasp its metanarrative,
Whenever X, then Y.
because the reduction of the metanarrative to chapters and verses added in the 1500s was the root for fragmentedly reading Scripture. It is clearly not a part of the metanarrative,
Whenever X, then Y.
and because the use of chapters and verses divert the reader's attention from the larger story of the practice of being encouraged to memorize verses. Even the text in Psalms requires a understanding of hiding stories in our lives,
Whenever X, then Y.
and because systematic theology has taken the fragmented view to a larger scale presenting themes without context instead of stories by thinking it is teaching what the Bible says on any given topic,
Whenever publishers publish Scripture, the chapters and verses become obstacles to the discovery of the metanarrative because publishers reinforce this poorly conceived configuration by continuing to format the text of Scripture with chapters and verses.
Therefore, the path to begin to help the reader comprehend the magnitude of the metanarrative in the text is to present a guide to the metanarrative in an overview format to help the reader begin to move away from those pesky little inserts called verses to the larger story presented in the text. The primary metanarrative of the text of Scripture can be broken down into a five-act play in which the reader becomes an "actor" in the final scenes of the play.
How do we understand the story of Scripture? It may well be understood as a way of projecting the church toward the future into the unknown. N.T Wright presents the following model.
Let’s just suppose that there was an existing play by Shakespeare. The play had five acts. Four Acts were completely written while only the first scene of the fifth Act had been written and there were some pointers as to how the play was going to end.
How would we act out Act 5, Scene Two? It would be inappropriate to actually write a final act and then act it out. The Act would be frozen into one form and commit Shakespeare to being responsible for a work which, in fact, was not his own. What one might do is to hire some actors and soak them thoroughly in the drama of the first four acts, plus scene one of Act 5 of the play, and call them to work out the remainder of Act 5.
What would they need to accomplish this task? They would need to know who the main character was, who the supporting characters were, and how they work within the first four acts plus Act 5 Scene 1 of the play. They would need to understand the whole plot of the drama so that the present actors could responsibly and appropriately compose their words and actions as they lived out Act 5, Scene 2 (5/2). The first four Acts would provide pointers on how to finish the play.
With this pattern in mind, Act 5 begins with the writing of the New Testament and ends with the renewal of the cosmos. We live in that period between the beginning and the ending of Act 5. We as actors would not want to simply repeat the earlier parts of the play over and over again.
We don’t have a script to tell us exactly what we are supposed to do. Have you ever thought that the early church had the Old Testament as their Scripture? It certainly did not demonstrate for them exactly how to “do” church. It did, however, give some clues like community and festive occasions to be observed.
© 2004 Winn Griffin