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Time and Telling: How to read biblical stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

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There is probably no more serious threat to the Church throughout the world than the multiplication of fundamentalist sects. According to Robin Gill, ‘Fundamentalism may be defined tentatively as a system of beliefs and practices which treat scriptural absolutism as the way to counter the pluralism and relativism engendered by modernity.’ In our new ‘age of anxiety’, they offer certainty and security. God has spoken and He has spoken clearly and this is what He has said. A proper analysis of fundamentalism would have to examine its rise in various forms in different faiths, including our own, and its political and social implications. In this article I wish to perform the much more limited task of suggesting how it is that a fundamentalist reading of the text relies upon thoroughly modern presuppositions as to how a text should be read. It is as contemporary as the relativism against which it protests. All narrative assumes a particular perception of space and time, the fundamental framework of any story. If we wish to break the hold of such a literalistic reading of the text we must become sensitive to its conventions of chronology and geography. Upon what clock and map does it rely? In particular I wish to suggest that a fundamentalist reading of scripture relies upon a modern understanding of time.

Let us start with St. John’s account of the death of Christ:

Since it was the day of Preparation, in order to prevent the bodies from remaining on the cross on the sabbath (for that sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Competing Convictions, London 1989. p. 23.

2 Unfortunately at the time of writing I had not had the benefit of reading the interesting article by Albert Paretsky OP. ‘Proleptic Recapitulation: Passover, Eucharist and God’s saving acts’, in New Blackfriars, December 1990, pp. 541–547.

3 The Fontana Economic History of Europe: the Middle Ages, quoted by Whitrow, G.J.. in Time in History: View of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day. Oxford 1989. p. xiGoogle Scholar.

4 Illuminations, New York 1969, p. 261, quoted by Charles Taylor in Sources of The self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge 1989, p. 288.

5 Quoted by Whitrow, op. cit., p. 128.

6 Ed. S. Safrai & M. Stern, The Jewish People in the First Century, Vol 2, Assen 1976. p. 847.

7 Rabbi Dr. Marcus Lehmann of Mainz, The Passover Haggadah, Jerusalem 1977, p. 320.

8 Terence, L. Donaldson, Jesus on the Mountain: a Study in Matthean Theology, Sheffield 1985, p. 5557Google Scholar.

9 op. cit. p. 127.

10 The Rise of the Novel, London 1957, p. 21.

11 New Blackfriars, March 1988.

12 op. Cit. p. 160.

13 Mortal Questions, Cambridge 1979, ch. 14.

14 loc. Cit.

15 Collected Letters, Vol. 1, p. 360. quoted by F. Kerr OP, Theology After Wittgenstein, Oxford, 1986, p. 60.