1. THE ROLE OF PARADIGM IN THE INTERPRETATION OF BIBLICAL
NARRATIVE
__________________
A Thesis
Presented to
Dr. Mark Leeds
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
__________________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for MATHE 5003
__________________
by
Benjamin L. Watson
April 1, 2014
3. APPROVAL SHEET
THE ROLE OF PARADIGM IN THE INTERPRETATION OF BIBLICAL
NARRATIVE
Benjamin Lloyd Watson
_______________________________________________________
Mark Leeds, Assistant Professor of Theology, Supervisor
_______________________________________________________
R. Keith Loftin, Assistant Professor of Humanities
_______________________________________________________
Mark Taylor, Professor of New Testament
5. ABSTRACT
THE ROLE OF PARADIGM IN THE INTERPRETATION OF BIBLICAL
NARRATIVE
This thesis highlights the role of paradigm and the paradigmatic imagination in
the construction of biblical narrative, and proposes that these concepts may positively
influence conservative interpretive approaches to biblical narrative by accounting for the
selection, inclusion, and arrangement of literary units.
Chapter 1 traces the conceptual development of memory, imagination, and
paradigm in the history of western philosophical discourse.
Chapter 2 surveys the state of evangelical approaches to biblical narrative,
noting particularly the “compositional approach” and its focus on phases of narrative
construction.
Chapter 3 identifies the influence of paradigm upon compositional decisions
and proposes ways in which the reader may identify the governing paradigm and literary
strategy of a text according to the compositional approach.
This thesis concludes with an appeal for paradigm-conscious interpretation and
suggests further avenues of study.
Benjamin Lloyd Watson
Advisor: Mark Leeds, Ph.D.
School of Theology
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014
6. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
The Role of Paradigm in the Interpretation of Biblical Narrative ................................... viii
Thesis......................................................................................................................... ix
Chapter
1. PARADIGM AND THE PARADIGMATIC IMAGINATION.........................10
Memory in the Platonic Dialogues ...........................................................13
Dynamic Memory in Aristotle..................................................................15
Mental Distension and Synthesis in Augustine ........................................16
Essence, Accident, and Counterfactuals in Aquinas ................................19
Perception and Impression in Hume.........................................................20
Paradigm and the Paradigmatic Imagination............................................22
2. A COMPOSITIONAL APPROACH TO BIBLICAL NARRATIVE................25
The Chicago Statements: A Conservative Corrective ..............................27
The Spectrum of Contemporary Evangelical Exegetical Methods...........29
Compositional Approach Defined ............................................................32
3. PARADIGM AS THE ORCHESTRATING FEATURE OF NARRATIVE
COMPOSITION ..................................................................................................40
Paradigmatic Imagination’s Role in Narrative Composition....................45
Unique Dynamics in the Interpretation of Biblical Narrative ..................50
Isolating the Author’s Paradigm...............................................................53
Purpose Statements in Narrative...............................................................54
Interpreting Narrative Units According to Paradigm ...............................72
7. Conclusion ........................................................................................................74
Summary of Paradigm’s Role in Composition.........................................75
Summary of Paradigm’s Importance in Interpretation .............................76
Identification of Further Avenues of Study..............................................76
Appeal for Consideration of Paradigm in Evangelical Exegesis..............77
BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................................................................................79
8. viii
THE ROLE OF PARADIGM IN THE INTERPRETATION OF BIBLICAL
NARRATIVE
While biblical interpretation remains central to evangelical theology, and
answers to questions about intention, context, or language pervade every sort of
evangelical theological publication, the philosophical substructures of these answers are
seldom addressed or even noticed. Hermeneutics, like theology or ethics, is a discipline
set out to answer questions—a particular set of questions with an equally particular set of
answers. The questions of hermeneutics are not theological questions principally; rather,
these are questions related to the human mind, the dynamics of communication, and the
nature of language and texts. Yet evangelical answers to the questions of hermeneutics
are often principally theological and biblical; while such answers are helpful, proposing
them without explicit recognition of their philosophical underpinnings risks a degree of
circular reasoning.1
So this thesis will attempt to offer a few helpful resources to those
who may wish to anchor conservative interpretive approaches to philosophy of mind.
The scope of this thesis must necessarily be limited to a small aspect of the
philosophy of mind, namely paradigm and the paradigmatic imagination, and the
application of this aspect must as well be limited to a single approach to scripture, namely
the compositional approach. One of the goals of this thesis is to demonstrate that the
propositions related to philosophy of mind are relevant and applicable to the task of
interpretation. The reader is therefore encouraged to recognize this thesis as a proposal to
1
Any variation of the following may qualify as the type of circular reasoning referenced here:
“The appropriate way to read this passage is X. We are certain X is the appropriate approach because X is
9. ix
wed the disciplines of philosophy, especially philosophy of mind and philosophy of
imagination, to the task of biblical interpretation, rather than a proposal for a particular
interpretive approach.
Thesis
The purpose of this thesis is to highlight the role of paradigm and the
paradigmatic imagination in the composition of biblical narrative according to the
compositional approach. It will trace the development of the concepts of paradigm and
the paradigmatic imagination within western philosophical discourse, it will outline the
processes involved in the composition of narrative utilizing the tools of the compositional
approach, and it will demonstrate the role which paradigm plays in the reconstruction and
orchestration of events, dialogue, and commentary within narrative as a genre. Finally,
this thesis will argue that biblical narrative may be better understood when due attention
is given to paradigm as the orchestrating element in the composition of biblical narrative.
________________________
an implication of passages 1 and 2. We understand passages 1 and 2 because we read them according to
approach X.”
10. 10
CHAPTER 1
PARADIGM AND THE PARADIGMATIC IMAGINATION
Before tracing the development of the concepts of paradigm and the
paradigmatic imagination in the history of western thought, it may be helpful to define a
few important terms. Central among these terms, and that from which all subsequent
terms are derivatives, is the philosophical concept of the imagination. The Encyclopedia
of American Philosophy outlines the functions of the imagination such that it is capable
of
internal visualization, concept creation, and manipulation not directly dependent
upon sensation. Imagination is associated with a range of phenomena: mental
imagery, fancy, inventiveness, insight, counterfactual reasoning, pretense,
simulation and conceivability.2
Imagination is that faculty which assimilates, manipulates, and reproduces sensory data
in the mind. Memory is an aspect of imagination, wherein recorded past perceptions are
reproduced and arranged into meaningful units for present consideration. Because the
imagination is capable of reproducing and arranging sensory data, it may also be
employed in forecasting potential circumstances and imagining alternative circumstances.
The imagination thus reproduces sensory data for the purposes of recollection, and
assembles and synthesizes sensory data for the purpose of counterfactual reasoning and
concept creation. Because of these two differing but related aspects, Leeds sees fit to
2
Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, 1st ed., s.v. “Imagination.”
11. 11
propose two aspects of the imagination—the sensory imagination and the paradigmatic
imagination:
The sensory imagination will be defined as the mental ability to simulate sense
experience. This includes not only the mental ability to recreate visual sense but the
ability to mentally simulate all five senses…. The paradigmatic imagination is the
outworking of the sensory imagination on a global level, although it sometimes
bypasses the direct use of sensory imagination altogether.3
A “paradigm” in this context is a model or framework which serves to filter
perceptions and thereby create meaning. Green’s explanation of paradigm is helpful:
The paradigm limits scientific attention to a particular narrow range of phenomena
and implies the rules under which research is to proceed. This limitation is not a
disadvantage but is in fact the main advantage of the paradigm, since science
otherwise would have no basis for attaching more significance to some facts than
others.4
As it relates to imagination, paradigm
can be concisely defined as a normative exemplar of constitutive structure.
Something serves as a paradigm by exhibiting a pattern, a coherent nexus of
relations in a simple and obvious way. Paradigms have a heuristic function, serving
to reveal the larger patterns in broad areas of experience that might otherwise
remain inaccessible because they appear incoherent or bewildering in their
complexity.5
Hence the paradigm functions within the imagination as a filter which synthesizes some
information and discards other information for the purpose of establishing relationships
between related and unrelated phenomena, and to clarify relationships between related
phenomena.
3
Mark Leeds, “Imagination as a Handmaiden to Theology: An Evangelical Appraisal of the
Role of Imagination in Theological Methodology” (PhD diss., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary,
Wake Forest, 2005), 34.
4
Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Grand Rapids: Wm.
B. Eerdmans, 1998), 46.
5
Ibid., 67. Emphasis mine.
12. 12
A related term that deserves investigation is “metaphor.” Metaphor is
important because of its relation to paradigm and the paradigmatic imagination. In basic
terms, a metaphor is an established relationship between two seemingly unrelated
phenomena which serves to represent and explain one of those phenomena with greater
depth and clarity. Bryant states that “metaphor is the result of an intentional
contradiction at one level of discourse for the sake of the emergence of a new meaning at
another level.”6
He further explains thus:
Metaphor is a statement… that speaks of one thing in terms of another… An
interpretation of this statement at the literal level leaves one without a logically
coherent meaning… The meaning of the metaphor, therefore, can emerge only when
one allows its literal meaning to self-destruct. The destruction of its literal meaning
paves the way for an interpretation on another, figurative level… Furthermore, the
metaphoric process… can also be said to characterize larger units than the
individual statement, for example, paragraphs or even entire works.7
Metaphor, then, is uniquely equipped to relay meaning on a level often more powerful
than that of literal speech. It equips the author/speaker with the tools to draw upon the
reader/listener’s established comprehension of familiar phenomena as a means of relating
the meaning and significance of unfamiliar phenomena.
The relationship between paradigm and metaphor becomes clear when
considering the imagination’s task of constructing relationships between unrelated
perceptions in order to create meaning. According to a set paradigm, which guides the
imagination’s incorporation or rejection of sensory or conceptual data into a cohesive
unit, the metaphor acts as an agent which clarifies those relationships and thereby relates
6
David J. Bryant, Faith and the Play of Imagination (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1989),
92.
7
Ibid., 93-94.
13. 13
a level of meaning that is impossible when dealing with the same data strictly on the
literal level.
The concepts of imagination, paradigm, and metaphor, and their relationship to
the act of recollection and the composition of narrative, will become clear by tracing their
development in western philosophy. While each concept has played a role in
anthropology and epistemology, they have not been related to the discipline of
hermeneutics until the mid-twentieth century. As such a correlation is foundational to
this thesis, an investigation into the development of these concepts and their eventual
maturity in the discipline of interpretation is appropriate.
Memory in the Platonic Dialogues
The first recorded speculations into the nature of the human imagination occur
in the Platonic dialogues and relate directly to memory. In Theaetetus Socrates attempts
to understand the nature of human knowledge. He therein attempts to discover the nature
of memory and establish a correlation between memory and sensory perception. Socrates
proposes
That there exists in the mind of man a block of wax, which is of different sizes in
different men; harder, moister, and having more or less purity in one than another,
and in some of an intermediate quality…. Let us say that this tablet is a gift of
Memory, the mother of the Muses.8
Sensory perceptions are impressed upon the memory just as the image upon a
signet ring is impressed on the wax seal of a royal proclamation.
When we wish to remember anything which we have seen, or heard, or thought in
our minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions and thoughts, and in that material
8
Plato, "Theatetus," in The Dialogues of Plato, v. IV, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1892), 254.
14. 14
receive the impression of them as from the seal of a ring; and that we remember and
know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or
cannot be taken, then we forget and do not know.9
The “imprint” within memory is then accessed when it corresponds with sensory
perceptions.
For Socrates, impressions, which are left behind by sense perceptions, are stored in
our memory and it is through our capacity for memory that we recall these
impressions and combine them with our immediate sense perceptions so that we see
an object as a particular object and form a belief about the object we perceive.10
Thus, for Plato, memory is that faculty which records sensory perceptions and relates
those past records with correlated sensory perceptions in the present.
The faculty of memory relates to the faculties of opinion and calculation in
Platonic thought. In Philebus, Socrates correlates the reception of sensory impressions
with “future calculations” and evaluation, noting that these are particularly human
faculties.
If you had no memory you would not recollect that you had ever been pleased, nor
would the slightest recollection of the pleasure which you feel at any moment
remain with you; and if you had no true opinion you would not think that you were
pleased when you were; and if you had no power of calculation you would not be
able to calculate on future pleasure, and your life would be the life, not of a man, but
of an oyster.11
Leeds highlights Plato’s emphasis on the “creativity of the imagination [which] allows
consideration of the future in addition to the past and present.”12
Such emphasis will bear
9
Ibid., 255.
10
Krisanna M Scheiterr, "Images, Appearances, and Phantasia in Aristotle," Phronesis, no. 57
(2012): 269.
11
Plato, "Philebus," in The Dialogues of Plato, v. IV, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York:
Oxford, 1892), 587.
12
Leeds, 6.
15. 15
upon later anthropological dialogue.
Dynamic Memory in Aristotle
Aristotle’s conception of the faculty of memory, although proceeding in many
ways from the Platonic framework, represents a significant adjustment to the
image/impression analogy. Aristotle tackles the work of memory and imagination in De
Anima.
Imagining lies within our power whenever we wish (e.g. we can call up a picture, as
in the practice of mnemonics by the use of mental images), but in forming opinions
we are not free: we cannot escape the alternative of falsehood or truth.13
Aristotle explains that the act of imagination is fundamentally tied to the act of
perception, thereby correlating imagination with memory and binding this faculty to the
sensory perceptions. “If then imagination presents no other features than those
enumerated…then imagination must be a movement resulting from an actual exercise of
a power of sense.”14
Aristotle’s conception of memory may be summarized thus:
Memory is an image that is accompanied by the perception of time… Images stored
in the primary sense organ come to be associated with one another so that
remembering one image, which is not the thing we are trying to remember, can lead
us to the image we want… Of course, images do not have to be associated
chronologically. Aristotle claims that we can “pass swiftly from one point to
another. e.g. from milk to white, from white to mist, and thence to moist, from
which one remembers Autumn if this be the season he is trying to recollect”15
13
Aristotle, "De Anima," in The Works of Aristotle Translated Into English, ed. J.A. Smith
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 428.
14
Ibid.
15
Scheiter, 269.
16. 16
Thus, Aristotle’s concept of memory involved a temporal aspect. Sensory perceptions
are recorded with something like a time stamp.16
These impressions are associated with
one another chronologically, and an aspect of memory involves sorting through these
impressions according to not only spatial and physical parameters, but also temporal
relationships. The sensory impressions, temporally associated, are referred to by
Aristotle as movements. “Each movement becomes associated with other movements,
generally through habit or custom, so that when one is set into motion the other one is
also set into motion.”17
Thus memory is capable of recognizing the relationship between
seemingly disparate phenomena through access patterns; in other words, the memory
repetitively establishes correlation between two impressions by accessing those
impressions simultaneously.
Mental Distension and Synthesis in Augustine
Augustine’s Confessions offers a major development upon the Aristotelian
conception of the human mind and imagination. While the primary concern of Plato and
Aristotle related to the memory, even when those memories were drawn upon to
conceptualize potential futures, Augustine further recognizes and establishes the
imagination as that faculty which draws upon sensory impressions in order to
conceptualize, calculate, and create.
Preserved [in the memory], classified and distinct, are all those impressions which
have been admitted [through the senses]… This huge repository of the memory,
16
Noteworthy among these adjustments, although not relevant to the purposes of this thesis, is
Aristotle's notion that sensory impressions were physically recorded upon the sensory organs themselves.
The Aristotelian conception of memory, then, is something like a physical library of related sensory
impressions accessed by the soul according to spatial, physical, and temporal parameters.
17
Scheiter, 270.
17. 17
with its secret and unimaginable caverns, welcomes and keeps all these things, to be
recalled and brought out for use when needed… For when I am sitting quietly in the
dark I can bring up colors in my memory if I wish, and distinguish white from black
and any others I select. No sounds burst in to intrude on these images acquired
through my eyes, which I am considering, though sounds too are present there, lying
hidden and stored in a place by themselves. I can summon them equally well, if I
wish, and find them present at once, though my tongue and throat are silent I sing as
much as I like… I can distinguish the scent of lilies from violets even though I am
not actually smelling anything, and honey from grape-juice, smooth from rough,
without tasting or feeling anything: I am simply passing them in review before my
mind by remembering them.18
In order to clarify the distinction between recollection and creation in the human
imagination, Augustine establishes the concepts of phantasia and phantasma.
Phantasia refers to a simple memory image generated by the mind’s internal vision,
whereas phantasma designates the product of the mind's activity in arranging and
rearranging into a coherent whole the disparate images stored in memory. The
dubious correspondence between a phantasma and external reality also suggests that
it is distinct from a phantasia.19
Augustine’s phantasma represents a singular contribution to a developing western
conception of human memory. For Augustine, “memory refers to the mind’s ability to
retain information gathered on the basis of sense experience and restore it to
consciousness (phantasia).”20
Further, Augustine suggests that memory is capable of
recording sensory data in its simplest form, and further capable of recalling and
synthesizing that data in units foreign from its original, temporal associations
(phantasma). The human mind, then, can recall data like “red,” “sharp,” and “sweet,”
18
Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 205-
06.
19
Marianne Djuth, “Veiled and Unveiled Beauty: the Role of the Imagination in Augustine's
Aesthetics,” Theological Studies 1, no. 68 (2007): 82.
20
Ibid., 79.
18. 18
and produce new images from the synthesis of such concepts. Such synthesis, he
explains, occurs naturally when reading a book or producing art.21
This notion of the mind’s ability to recall and synthesize depends upon what
has been referred to as Augustine’s conception of the diachronically unified
consciousness. The term refers to the “experience of unity in one’s mental life.” It seeks
to explain “how the mind’s single mental present is able to accommodate a succession of
time-bound acts.”22
Augustine’s account of diachronically unified consciousness arises from his view
that the mind’s “present” is capable of “distending” in order to hold multiple times
in mental existence at once… Augustine presents mental distension as the solution
to a very specific problem: our experiences of sensory objects include a sense of
temporal duration… but it seems, Augustine says, that no stretch of time actually
exists to be measured. Only the present exists… He concludes that time-
measurement can only be explained if distinct moments exist all together in the
“mental present.”23
Augustine’s proposal of the distended consciousness, with its ability to synthesize
sensory phenomena, represents the foundation of Augustine’s conception of the human
imagination. The human imagination “straddles two worlds,” grasping “temporal
multiplicity in a single unified perspective.”24
The act of recollection is itself the
distended memory grasping an image or impression and displaying it in the mental
present. Such a conception of the human imagination is adopted and clarified by Thomas
Aquinas.
21
Ibid., 81.
22
T.S. Cory, “Diachronically Unified Consciousness in Augustine and Aquinas,” Vivarium, no.
50 (2012): 356.
23
Ibid., 357-59.
24
Ibid., 364.
19. 19
Essence, Accident, and Counterfactuals in Aquinas
Aquinas’ conception of the human imagination and memory represents an
amalgam of the Augustinian and Aristotelian frameworks for understanding the human
mind. While retaining the diachronically unified consciousness of Augustine, Aristotle
clarifies the boundaries between self, perceived objects, and the forms in which those
objects participate. “For Aquinas, any cognitive object is manifested to me as the object
of my particular intellectual act; conversely, I grasp my intellectual act as my act of
thinking about this object.”25
Such a distinction becomes relevant because “an awareness
of my present act and of myself as its agent is built into my present cognition of essences
and remains part of my memory of those essences.”26
The perception and distinction of
objects and essences from the self allows Aquinas to relegate memory and recollection to
the realm high cognitive transaction.
Augustine allows the mind to perform both short-term and long-term unification,
whereas in Aquinas, short-term unification occurs in the corporeal imagination and
long-term unification at the highest levels of the incorporeal intellect.27
This relegation of memory and recollection assists Aquinas in amplifying Augustine’s
proposal of the imagination’s creative faculties.
The proposal that memory not only relates sensory phenomena, but also
perceives self, objects, and essences, permits Aquinas to suggest a fuller dimension of the
human imagination’s creative faculties. He does so with the analogy of the golden
mountain. Leeds highlights and explains Aquinas’ illustration:
25
Ibid., 376.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 380.
20. 20
Aquinas explains, “Some of the knowing powers can form other species from those
first conceived; thus the imagination from the preconceived species of a mountain
and of gold can form the species of a golden mountain.” While this ability to create
new images is limited to the combination of sense impressions already obtained by
the one imagining, this type of creativity would later become a major component of
the imagination in philosophical thought.28
Augustine’s proposal, namely that the human imagination is capable of joining sensory
perceptions from within the human memory is limited in its application to the production
of images which resemble things already encountered. For example, Augustine suggests
that many images of Christ are the product of such synthesis.29
While these images are
not accurate portrayals of Christ, they are themselves more or less accurate portrayals of
a man in his mid-thirties. Aquinas presses further, suggesting that the human imagination
is capable of producing impossible (respective to human experience) images, such as a
mountain made of gold. It is here that Aquinas’ distinction of object from essence, and
the suggestion that memory perceives both, empowers the human imagination to
synthesize the essences and accidents of diverse objects into unique counterfactuals.
Perception and Impression in Hume
Hume’s conception of the imagination is also derived from Aquinas’
distinction of the self from object and essence, yet his distinct departure from Augustine
and Aquinas’ diachronically unified self amplifies several aspects of the creative faculty
of imagination.30
Hume rejects the Augustinian and Thomist framework of the
28
Leeds, 12.
29
Djuth, 81.
30
“Aquinas's account of diachronically unified consciousness thus resonates with Hume's claim
that our sense of personal identity across time derives from something similar among impressions, i.e., a
reference to the cognizing subject, the “I”. But for Aquinas, that reference does not refer to some subject, or
to the past subject of each past act—rather, it inevitably and exclusively refers to the present subject,
21. 21
diachronically unified consciousness. In particular, he “rejects the distinction between
imagination and intellect in ‘explicitly distinguishing memory of past events as a separate
representational faculty, rather than subsuming it as a function of the imagination.”31
Yet
Hume retains Aquinas’ proposed creative, conceptual power of the imagination. Hume
proposes three principal creative faculties of the imagination.
First, the imagination has the imagistic power to copy (along with memory) simple
and complex impressions through which the mind is supplied with ideas. Second, it
has the conceptual power to reorder and arrange these ideas in ways that give rise to
new complex ideas that do not correspond to any real existence or matter of fact.
And, third, it has the productive power to create a peculiar class of ideas that have
no discoverable reference to impressions at all.32
Each of these creative faculties of the imagination depends upon an important
epistemological distinction: “Hume’s epistemology is based famously on the principle
that all perceptions of the mind are divisible into impressions—either external (from the
senses) or internal (from passions and sentiments)—and ideas.”33
Hume suggests that
impressions provide the material from which ideas are composed.
Nothing, at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of man… To
form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination
no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects. And while
the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty;
the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the
universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is
supposed to lie in total confusion… But though our thought seems to possess this
unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really
confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind
________________________
because the cognizing subject is always exclusively present-tense and can only be conceived of as such”
(Ibid.)
31
Timothy M. Costelloe, “Hume and the Phenomenology of the Imagination,” The Journal of
Scottish Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2007): 32.
32
Ibid., 31.
33
Ibid., 32.
22. 22
amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or
diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think
of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with
which we were formerly aquainted.34
Therefore, the creative faculty of the imagination empowers the mind to conceptualize
and produce unique counterfactuals, and, most importantly, new mental constructs, from
the stuff of sensory and mental impressions. The ability to synthesize sensory
impressions into counterfactuals and assemble ideas into unique mental constructs
represents the foundation of contemporary proposals related to the paradigmatic
imagination.
Paradigm and the Paradigmatic Imagination
The concept of paradigm, as it relates to the human imagination, was initially
developed in the discipline of philosophy of science. In an effort to account for the
radical nature of scientific revolutions, and for whole and comprehensive change to the
methodology of scientific investigation in the wake of scientific revolutions, Thomas S.
Kuhn, in his landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, proposed that the human
imagination plays a role in the synthesis of and approach to research and data.35
Kuhn
suggests that the human mind synthesizes phenomena according to interpretive lenses;
these interpretive lenses filter and sort research and data according to set parameters,
establishing relationships between seemingly unrelated results. Pulling from an ancient
34
David Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding," in Hume's Enquiries, ed.
L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 18-19.
35
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962).
23. 23
use of the Greek paradeigma, used in architecture to refer to the model or blueprint of a
building, Kuhn suggests that a paradigm
represents the essential pattern by which scientists learn to see an aspect of nature
and is therefore key to the terminology, instrumentation, methods, and data for a
science or part of science under its sway.36
Such interpretive lenses dictate the conclusions and methodology of entire epochs of
scientific progress. Kuhn proposes that scientific revolutions, like that which followed
the published works of Copernicus or Newton, represent the product not of random
surges in scientific energy, but in a paradigm shift that defines new rules and terms for
scientific investigation.
A parallel to Kuhn’s proposal was quickly established within the 20th
century
philosophical dialogue about the human imagination. Garrett Green, in a pivotal work on
the imagination in Christian theology, establishes a framework for understanding the
human imagination according to Kuhn’s conception of paradigm.
Something serves as a paradigm—that is, as an exemplar or ideal type—because it
shows forth a pattern, a coherent nexus of relations, in a simple and straightforward
manner. Paradigms function heuristically by revealing the constitutive patterns in
more complex aspects of our experience that might otherwise remain recalcitrant,
incoherent, or bewildering.37
The paradigm by which the human mind filters perceptions and impressions is the
orchestrating element in the creation of meaning and conception of unique mental
constructs. Green follows Kuhn’s logic, also, in suggesting that a shared paradigm within
a community equips that community to interpret situations, texts, and events similarly
and to communicate clearly. Especially important to the purposes of this thesis, shared
36
Green, 50.
37
Ibid., 52.
24. 24
paradigms equip an audience to react empathetically, to appropriately assign meaning to
analogies and metaphors, and to identify accurately the meaning of literal and figurative
texts. Interpretation of experience, composition and interpretation of texts, and
proposition of truth-claims, therefore, cannot take place outside of the influence of
paradigms.
There is no theory-neutral foundation against which to measure interpretations…
We can continue to appeal to the facts, to aim at a truth beyond our own
subjectivity, as long as we remember that all theoretical concepts, even the concept
of facts, are paradigm-dependent. In other words, right interpretation depends on
right imagination; whether we get things right or not is a function not only of our
intelligence and powers of observation, but also of the lenses through which we
observe.38
Green’s proposition is not a post-modern rejection of truth-claims. Instead, Green
highlights the orchestrating influence of paradigm in the human imagination, and rejects
any truth-claims which do not account for the influence of the governing paradigm. This
thesis will propose that Green’s emphasis upon the governing influence of paradigm in
the creation and interpretation of texts may be helpful in the exegetical process. The next
priority of this thesis is to select an exegetical approach that might be strengthened
through comprehension of the governing paradigm of a text. Before choosing such an
approach, however, a brief explanation of the present state of conservative exegesis may
be appropriate.
38
Garrett Green, Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the
End of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17. Emphasis mine.
25. 25
CHAPTER 2
A COMPOSITIONAL APPROACH TO BIBLICAL NARRATIVE
A break occurred in the history of biblical interpretation in the eighteenth
century, whereby the broad consensus of protestant biblical scholarship moved away
from a pre-critical reading of biblical narrative toward a historical-critical framework.
Hans Frei, in his landmark Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, identifies three major
characteristics of a pre-critical reading of biblical narrative:
First, if it seemed clear that a biblical story was to be read literally, it followed
automatically that it referred to and described actual historical events… Second…
that if the real historical world described by the several biblical stories is a single
world of one temporal sequence, there must in principle be one cumulative story to
depict it… Third… since the world truly rendered by combining biblical narratives
into one was indeed the one and only world, it must in principle embrace the
experience of any present age and reader.39
In other words, a pre-critical approach “saw in the biblical narratives a coherent world in
its own right that had a reality of its own and into which the biblical interpreters had to fit
their own lives.”40
Such an approach characterized western biblical scholarship through
the Reformation, but began to decline as interpreters suspected a “logical and reflective
distance between narrative and reality.”41
39
Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 2-3.
40
John H. Sailhamer, Introduction to Old Testament Theology: A Canonical Approach (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 36.
41
Frei, 5.
26. 26
Protestant biblical scholarship in the eighteenth century largely replaced the
pre-critical reading with what is now identified as a historical-critical approach; such an
approach endeavored to answer a different set of questions, and brought with it a
different set of tools.
Literal reading came increasingly to mean two things: grammatical and lexical
exactness in estimating what the original sense of a text was to its original audience,
and the coincidence of the description with how the facts really occurred. Realistic
reading came in effect to be identical with the latter; it consisted of matching the
written description against the reconstruction of the probably historical sequence to
which it referred…The question was: How reliable are the texts?42
The historical-critical approach was, and is still, characterized by a different type of
investigation. Hence J.I. Packer identifies the issues which have since dominated biblical
scholarship: “on the one hand, minute enquiry into the sources, dates, authorship,
occasion, and purpose of the biblical books, and on the other hand, attempts to
reconstruct… the sequence of events which the Bible itself narrates.”43
Some have
attempted to correlate this with anti-supernatural skepticism as attempts to reconstruct the
events of biblical narrative reject the feasibility of supernatural phenomena a priori.44
The narrative texts themselves, in the historical-critical approach, become the means by
which the interpreter grasps the events errantly depicted within the text. In other words,
42
Ibid., 7-8.
43
J.I Packer, God Has Spoken: Revelation and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 84.
44
“The historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a
closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by a succession of cause and effect…
This closedness means that the continuum of historical happenings cannot be rent by the interference of
supernatural, transcendent powers, and that therefore there is not ‘miracle’ in the sense of the word. Such a
miracle would be an event whose cause did not lie in history.” (Rudolf Bultmann, “Is Exegesis Without
Presuppositions Possible?,” in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, trans. Schubert
M. Ogden [New York: Meridian, 1960], 291-92).
27. 27
the reader utilizes the text as one tool in the process of discovering “what actually
happened.”
The Chicago Statements: A Conservative Corrective
A corrective on historical-critical excesses took place in the mid-twentieth
century in the form of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy and, subsequently, the
Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics.45
The CSBI functionally represented a
modified return to pre-critical exegesis. The committee commissioned46
to articulate
such a return rejected the presuppositions of historical-critical approaches outright,
stating that “Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states
about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary
origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.”47
Instead, the Chicago Statement affirmed verbal-plenary inspiration, and articles III, VI,
and VII gave a general outline of the verbal-plenary approach.
Article III. We affirm that the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by
God. We deny that the Bible is merely a witness to Revelation…
Article VI. We affirm that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very
words of the original, were given by divine inspiration…
Article VII. We affirm that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit,
through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine.48
45
CSBI and CSBH, respectively.
46
International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, or ICBI.
47
International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,”
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21, no. 4 (1978): 291. Emphasis mine.
48
Ibid., 290-91.
28. 28
While the statement itself clarifies that allowances must be made for the text to be studied
as a work of human literature, including appreciation for literary devices such as
hyperbole, narrative selection, etc., the interpretive implications of such an approach had
yet to be articulated.
Shortly after the publication of the CSBI, the ICBI identified multiple
hermeneutical implications to a pre-critical approach; these implications were
subsequently outlined in the CSBH. For, “it was recognized that while belief in the
inerrancy of Scripture is basic to maintaining its authority, that belief and commitment
have real value only so far as the meaning and message of Scripture are understood.”49
Among these, Articles VI, X, XV, and XVI are noteworthy.
ARTICLE VI. We affirm that the Bible expresses God’s truth in propositional
statements, and we declare that biblical truth is both objective and absolute. We
further affirm that a statement is true if it represents matters as they actually are, but
is an error if it misrepresents the facts…
ARTICLE X. We affirm that Scripture communicates God’s truth to us verbally
through a wide variety of literary forms…
ARTICLE XV. We affirm the necessity of interpreting the Bible according to its
literal, or normal, sense. The literal sense is the grammatical-historical sense, that
is, the meaning which the writer expressed. Interpretation according to the literal
sense will take account of all figures of speech and literary forms found in the text.
We deny the legitimacy of any approach to Scripture that attributes to it meaning
which the literal sense does not support…
ARTICLE XVI. We affirm that legitimate critical techniques should be used in
determining the canonical text and its meaning…50
Most noteworthy in the CSBH is the recommended use of critical techniques as a means
of isolating the meaning of the inspired text itself. In other words, the CSBH articulates a
49
International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, “The Chicago Statement on Biblical
Hermeneutics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 25, no. 4 (1982): 397.
50
Ibid., 398-400.
29. 29
modified return to pre-critical exegesis, whereby the biblical interpreter utilizes the tools
of historical-critical scholarship to identify from the text “what God by the human writer
was expressing to the latter’s envisaged readers.”51
While the text remains the object of
study, the tools of historical-critical scholarship are employed to aid the evangelical
exegete to understand the text as an end.
The Spectrum of Contemporary Evangelical Exegetical Methods
In the wake of the Chicago Statements, evangelical exegetical methods tend to
lean in one of two directions in the process of interpretation. While nearly all evangelical
exegetical methods engage in lexical, grammatical, and syntactical analysis, and nearly
all encourage some type of sentence diagraming or pericope/argument analysis, some
methods emphasize proficiency in the tools of historical-critical scholarship, endeavoring
to grasp the intended meaning of the author through comprehensive background studies.
Other methods emphasize proficiency in the tools of literary interpretation, endeavoring
to grasp the meaning of the text as literature. Before selecting an interpretive method
according to which the impact of paradigm and the paradigmatic imagination might be
measured, it may be helpful to highlight the relevance of contextual and literary study to
the task of biblical interpretation.
Context/background Intensive Methods
Background-intensive exegetical methods attempt to overcome the distance
between the reader and the author can be represented not by centuries but by millennia,
51
This statement is extracted from an exposition of the CSBH which does not appear in the
original publication, but which was subsequently published in Packer, 157-180.
30. 30
encompassing the rise and fall of world-conquering empires, the birth and death of
dialects, and the discovery of a new world. The perspective of the author of a biblical
text is dramatically different than that of its final audience; assumptions may have been
made, moral norms may have been assumed, entire worldviews may have been
presupposed—allusions to cultural and national phenomena not only unknown to most
present readers, but perhaps impossible to know outside of the assistance of
archeologists, historians, and sociologists— that prohibit the reader from appropriately
interpreting the text before him. Contextual investigation assists the reader to close such
a significant worldview chasm.
The goal of the use of background material is to help the reader place himself or
herself into the shoes (or sandals) of the original readers… It is an attempt to
recreate as much of the shared environment between the writer and original readers
as possible. Modern readers are too distant in both time and culture to do this
thoroughly. Nevertheless, we should attempt to grow continually in our
understanding of the ancient context in order to become better interpreters of the
text.52
The strengths of background-intensive methods are simple: they assist the reader to
disengage the bias of his current perspective, to adopt the mindset the author may have
had when writing, and to comprehend the situation which the author may have been
addressing.
An investigation related to the author’s governing paradigm may play a helpful
role in the selection and synthesis of contextual data. In essence, an investigation into the
worldview of an author is a major part of an investigation into the governing paradigm of
an author; but readers who engage in background-intensive methods of interpretation
52
Darrell L. Bock and Buist M. Fanning, eds., Interpreting the New Testament Text (Wheaton:
Crossway Books, 2006), 169.
31. 31
may discover more efficiently the meaning of the text by allowing repeated exposure to
the text to dictate aspects of the author’s paradigm. Having captured, to some degree,
relevant aspects of the paradigm of the author, the reader is better equipped to identify
relevant contextual data which may illuminate more troubling passages. While such a
venture is outside of the scope of this thesis, it will be recommended as a potential
avenue of further research.
Literary Analysis Intensive Methods
Adherents to more literary methods of biblical interpretation do not reject the
claim that a chasm has developed between the perspective of the biblical author and the
present-day reader. Rather, literary methods propose that the authors were aware, to a
significant degree, of the diverse nature of their potential readership, and therefore made
few assumptions about the worldview of their potential readers. In other words,
conservative literary methods assume that the author included, for his readers (immediate
and ultimate), most requisite details to accomplish an accurate interpretation of the text.
They propose that the biblical texts themselves, therefore, are stand-alone works of
literature. Further, they propose that, when the appropriate distinctions are made—
namely when the text is understood as the purposed work of an author—then
accomplishing the task of exegesis become primarily a literary matter. In other words,
when the reader comprehends the nature of a text as literature, then he is capable of
identifying the literary strategy of the author.
When viewed as a whole, biblical texts can be approached as single literary units
composed of many smaller units of texts. In the interweaving of these parts into a
32. 32
whole, a discernible strategy can be traced throughout the entire work. That
strategy is the key to the theology of the book.53
Thus, when the biblical texts are approached as strategic literary compositions, the tools
used to interpret those texts are fundamentally literary by nature. Literary methods focus
on questions about genre, allusion, analogy and metaphor, character development,
dialogue, and argument.
The remainder of this thesis will be devoted to investigating how paradigm
recognition might be helpful in the task of exegesis according to a literary exegetical
method. In order to appropriately appreciate the impact of paradigm recognition on
literary analysis, however, it will be helpful to explicitly identify a single literary
exegetical approach, and to briefly investigate the unique nuances of that approach.
Compositional Approach Defined
Twelve years prior to the articulation of the CSBI and CSBH, Bervard Childs,
in his landmark Biblical Theology in Crisis, notes the departure of historical-critical
scholarship from an appropriate context for biblical theology and exegesis.54
While valid
meaning, he admits, may be derived from biblical interpretation of many sorts, the
diverse perspectives of historical-critical scholarship confound the reader whose intention
is to accurately comprehend the theology of each biblical text, and of the bible as a
whole. Against his contemporaries, Childs proposed that
the historicocritical method is an inadequate method for studying the Bible as the
Scriptures of the church because it does not work from the needed context. This is
not to say for a moment that the critical method is incompatible with Christian
53
Sailhamer, 43.
54
Bervard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970).
33. 33
faith… but rather that the critical method, when operating from its own chosen
context, is incapable of either raising or answering the full range of questions which
the church is constrained to direct to its Scripture.55
He proposed, then, a new “shape” for biblical theology: to approach the Scriptures within
the canonical context.56
A few noteworthy distinctives characterized Child’s canonical
approach to the Scriptures:
(1) A critiqued and recalibrated use of the historical-critical method; (2) a unique
handling of the final-form or the text;… (3) passing yet pregnant observations on
the status of the Hebrew and Greek text-traditions;… (4) sensitivity to the so-called
premodern history of interpretation… but with a critical evaluation of this history
based upon insights from our own historical-critical season of reading and analyzing
texts; and (5) biblical-theological handling of the two Testaments, in which the Old
retains its voice as Christian Scripture, and Biblical Theology is more than a
sensitive appreciation of how the New handles the Old.57
While Child’s approach represented the concerns of critical scholarship—he goes so far
as to claim that “the Fundamentalist position [is] indefensible”—his appeal to approach
and consider each biblical text according to its place and participation within a canon
gained the attention of explicitly conservative theologians. Notable among these are John
Goldingay, Graeme Goldsworthy, and John Sailhamer.
While each author responds directly to Child’s claims, Goldingay most
comprehensively absorbs Child’s “new shape” and expresses the implications of such an
approach for the evangelical exegete. Goldingay notes a few particulars to be employed
in service of a canon-conscious interpretation. First, he notes that the individual units of
55
Ibid., 141.
56
Ibid., 99.
57
Christopher R. Seitz, "The Canonical Approach and Theological Interpretation," in Canon
and Biblical Interpretation, ed. Craig G. Bartholemew (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 59.
34. 34
text within the OT and NT canon bear the shape of a canonical work.58
The participation
of each text in the narrative of the canon gives each text a “rhetorical form” which
influences the interpretation of each narrative unit.59
Second, he proposes that the
appropriate object of study (in this case, of the OT canonical works) is the canonical
works themselves, rather than the people of Israel as represented in the canonical works.
In other words, the canonical shape of biblical narrative texts suggests that each text,
rather than representing a historical artifact of a religious people, participates in a grand
canonical narrative and should be thus read.60
Third, the intentionality behind the
canonical shape of each biblical text implies that the canonical approach should resist the
imposition of non-canonical creeds and traditions in the act of interpretation.61
Finally,
Goldingay proposes that a conservative canonical approach must admit that each canon
(OT and NT) illumines the other, while simultaneously standing as a canonical statement
in its own right.62
Ultimately, Childs endorses a canonical approach that is “God-
centered, intertextually oriented, authority conscious” and clarifies the purpose of the
Scriptures: “to bring people to salvation, to make people holy, to make proficient
disciples of Jesus Christ.”63
58
John Goldingay, Key Questions about Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2011), 255.
59
Ibid., 256.
60
Ibid., 258.
61
Ibid., 261.
62
Ibid., 267-273.
63
Ibid., 254.
35. 35
Graeme Goldsworthy likewise espouses a canonical approach to biblical
theology. Goldsworthy proposes two interpretive steps for the reader:
The first is what is sometimes referred to as a synchronic approach. This involves
the analytical examination of the parts of the whole and includes exegesis or a close
reading of the parts of the biblical canon. It is synchronic in that it examines the
texts relating to one period of time. Studies in the theology of a prophet, of a single
book, or of one period in Israel’s history are synchronic. However, the unity of the
Bible reminds us that no exegetical task is complete until we have related a specific
text to the overall message of Scripture. Thus, synchronic analysis requires that we
also engage in diachronic synthesis. This recognizes both the unity of Scripture and
the progressive nature of revelation.”64
Most noteworthy is the confessional nature Goldsworthy’s approach presupposes. While
engaging and utilizing the canonical emphases of Childs, Goldsworthy assumes the faith
of the reader, and permits interpretation only according to such a confessional lens.
The most precise and influential of the proponents of conservative canonical
approaches is John Sailhamer. In his landmark Introduction to Old Testament Theology,
Sailhamer employs a text-oriented, canonical, compositional, diachronic approach to
biblical interpretation. The canonical approach sets its attention upon the text, for “if our
starting point is verbal inspiration, then the text should be the focus of our biblical
theology.”65
Second, the canonical approach recognizes that, “in [the Old Testament],
and along with the New Testament, we find a complete statement of the will of God.”66
Third, and most important to the purposes of this thesis, the canonical approach studies
the text as an orchestrated composition of a biblical author.
64
Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel Centered Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: IVP Academic,
2010), 260.
65
Sailhamer, 199.
66
Ibid., 198.
36. 36
It attempts to trace the ways the biblical writers organized and fashioned literary
units into unified texts and whole books as well as to understand theological
characteristics of their finished works.67
Finally, the canonical approach maintains that the attention of the theologian ought to be
set primarily upon each work individually, as a part of the whole canon, rather than upon
the canon as comprised of individual parts.68
The respective approaches of Sailhamer,
Goldsworthy, and Goldingay represent the bulk of contemporary conservative literary
approaches. This thesis will set its attention upon a derivative approach influenced by
each of these three authors.
The compositional approach represents a derivative of these conservative
canonical approaches. It thereby represents a conservative response to the issues raised
by Childs, as well as an attempt to maintain the balance represented by the CSBI and
CSBH.69
As stated above, this thesis will attempt to demonstrate the role of paradigm
and the paradigmatic imagination according to the compositional approach. Before
proceeding to establish the relatedness of these disciplines, however, it will be helpful to
define the compositional approach and to explain the tools used in the compositional
approach.
The compositional approach to exegesis, like all literary approaches, assumes
that a high degree of intentionality is involved in every aspect of a biblical text’s
composition. Especially relevant in the interpretation of biblical narrative, the
67
Ibid., 206.
68
Ibid., 237.
69
The confessional approach here described admits particular dependence upon Sailhamer's
five-stage model of biblical-hermeneutical distinctions.
37. 37
compositional approach identifies meaning by approaching the text as, by nature, a
composite of multiple narrative accounts woven together to form a single narrative unit.
Composition exists when two or more written units or sections have been
intentionally placed together to form a larger work. In short, it is the process by
which the author has produced his text. Composition is the bringing together of
separate units into one. This is in contrast to redaction, which is supplementation
done on an existing body of work. Composition may consist of the interweaving of
units of narrative, poetry, and law codes, as in the Pentateuch, revealing a
‘discernible strategy’ that can be seen throughout the work, or it may result in the
combining of larger narrative cycles into collections or larger continuous narratives
such as the Joseph narrative.70
Because the compositional approach identifies independent narrative units, and
recognizes the process of composition, which includes the selection and arrangement of
those units, the compositional approach answers two questions:
A compositional approach… answers the question of how the parts make up the
whole and why they are placed together. It recognizes the indications left by the
author as to his intent, yet at the same time his presence may not be obvious to the
reader. The task is therefore not so much to recognize his presence but to understand
his intent or purpose. Furthermore, this type of approach pursues how an exegetical
unit functions inside the larger composition.71
Seeing the seams of biblical narratives is not the final goal of the compositional
approach. Rather, the compositional approach attempts to comprehend the author’s
purposes for selection and arrangement of those narrative units, and the contribution of
each unit to the literary strategy of the work as a whole. It seeks, ultimately, to identify
the narrative strategy of the work as a whole, and again to utilize that literary strategy as a
means of interpreting each narrative unit individually.
70
Randall L. McKinnion, “An Analysis of a Compositional Approach to Biblical Narrative
(Genesis 37)” (PhD diss., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, 2006), 51.
71
Ibid., 52.
38. 38
In order to decipher the purpose of an author’s selection and arrangement of
narrative units and the contribution of those units to the literary strategy of the whole, the
compositional approach first uses literary techniques to decipher the smallest units of
biblical narrative.
This analysis exists on different levels— grammatical, lexical, syntactical.
However, the analysis of a text as such begins with the smallest unit of thought and
extends ever wider. Therefore, analysis of this communicative act begins with the
determination of how the individual clauses are presented and integrated into a
whole text.72
Literary analysis is not limited to grammar and syntax, however, as the compositional
approach engages all the tools of literary interpretation. Analogy and metaphor, character
development, and dialogue are considered as a means of comprehending the strategy of
the author on both on the micro-narrative and macro-narrative levels.
Proceeding beyond literary analysis of the individual narrative units, the
compositional approach also utilizes the literary tools of in-textuality, inner-textuality,
and inter-textuality. In-textuality simply refers to the task of identifying “the inner
coherehence of the smallest units of text,” for “the various parts of even the smallest
literary units can be expected to belong together and to make sense as a whole.”73
Inner-
textuality attempts to identify the literary strategy of whole narrative books. The attempt
to understand the literary strategy of a canonical biblical narrative, and to utilize that
strategy in interpreting the individual units within that narrative, is the work of inner-
textuality. Finally, the compositional approach engages in the global task of inter-
textuality.
72
Ibid., 68.
73
Sailhamer, 207.
39. 39
Many written texts, especially biblical ones, were written with the full awareness of
other texts in mind. Their authors assumed the readers would be thoroughly
knowledgable of those other texts. The New Testament books, for example, assume
a comprehensive understanding of the OT. Many OT texts also assume their readers
are aware and knowledgeable of other OT texts.74
Inter-textuality, then, represents the attempt to understand the purpose of a text’s
allusions to or citations of other canonical texts. In many cases, such inter-textual
allusions may represent, explicitly or implicitly, the over-arching literary strategy of the
narrative as a whole.
The primary proposal of this thesis is that the paradigm of a biblical author
provides the blueprint of narrative composition. In other words, this thesis will propose
that the paradigm is the orchestrating feature of narrative composition that governs the
selection and arrangement of narrative units in the composition of biblical narrative. The
compositional approach, it will be argued, is an appropriate vehicle to demonstrate the
relevance of the paradigmatic imagination in the interpretation of biblical narrative. The
final section of this thesis will demonstrate, utilizing the tools of the compositional
approach, how paradigm may be helpful in the exegetical process. 75
74
Ibid., 213.
75
It may be noted that this thesis does not intend to promote any exegetical approach over any
other. While many exegetical approaches are valid, the scope of this paper must limit application of
paradigm to a single approach. Paradigm's direct influence in the composition of narrative is perhaps more
evident, at least initially, when approaching a canonical text with a literary emphasis, so this paper will
employ a literary-strategy sensitive approach.
40. 40
CHAPTER 3
PARADIGM AS THE ORCHESTRATING FEATURE OF NARRATIVE
COMPOSITION
The purpose of this section is to identify ways in which the task of exegesis
may be simplified and strengthened through a consideration of the biblical author’s
paradigm. Such a purpose presupposes a correlation between paradigm, an aspect of the
human imagination, and the composition of narrative. In order to establish such a
correlation, it may be prudent to take a closer look at the work of Thomas Kuhn, whose
consideration of paradigm as a concept, and whose investigation into the implications of
such a concept for human thought, laid the foundation upon which subsequent paradigm-
related proposals in philosophy have been dependent.
Kuhn, while a graduate student in theoretical physics, was puzzled at the
seemingly radical nature of scientific revolutions. Scientific progress, it seemed, was a
cumulative effort—data stacked upon data until new and unique conclusions were made.
The tools of scientific enquiry became increasingly accurate as the content and results of
scientific investigation became increasingly precise. Such a confidence in the cumulative
pattern of scientific progress had dictated the historiographical enterprise since the
enlightenment. Yet, when studying the same subject matter in parallel academic fields,
Kuhn notes, “I was struck by the number and extent of the overt disagreements between
social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods.”76
Such
76
Kuhn, x.
41. 41
disagreements called into question the confidence with which historians of science had
often explained scientific progress. Indeed, historians of science contemporary to Kuhn
increasingly struggled to account for radical and abrupt shifts in the scientific
community, shifts which corresponded with unique conclusions that dictated new rules
guiding research, new objects of investigation, and new hypotheses of entire generations
of scientists.
A few historians of science have been finding it more and more difficult to fulfil the
functions that the concept of development-by-accumulation assigns to them. As
chroniclers of an incremental process, they discover that additional research makes
it harder, not easier, to answer questions like: When was oxygen discovered? Who
first conceived of energy conservation? Increasingly, a few of them suspect that
these are simply the wrong sorts of questions to ask.77
The proposal guiding historians of science had always been relatively simple: those
predominate theories were founded upon data yielded by scientific investigation which
was by degrees less accurate, less precise, less scientific than subsequent data, or were as
a whole the product of idiosyncrasies of culture, tradition, or religion. In reality,
the more carefully [these historians] study, say, Aristotelian dynamics, phlogistic
chemistry, or caloric thermodynamics, the more certain they feel that those once
current views of nature were, as a whole, neither less scientific nor more the product
of human idiosyncrasy than those current today.78
Now suspicious of the cumulative theory, “historians of science have begun to ask new
sorts of questions and to trace different, and often less than cumulative developmental
lines for the sciences.”79
Among them, Kuhn noticed a peculiar phenomenon.
77
Ibid., 2.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid., 3.
42. 42
What differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of
method—they were all “scientific”—but what we shall come to call their
incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science in it.80
Kuhn’s initial conclusions began to change the way he approached the history of science
and scientific revolutions. He began to attribute the abrupt shifts in the scientific
community, which had often been relegated to arbitrary bursts of scientific energy within
whole scientific communities, to something like a shift in worldview of the scientists
themselves. Kuhn concluded that
Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has
acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental
entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other
and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities
and what techniques employed in seeking solutions? At least in the mature
sciences, answers (or full substitutes for answers) to questions like these are firmly
embedded in the educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for
professional practice.81
Kuhn suggests that something like a worldview, which dictates the procedures,
methodology, rules, and objectives of scientific research, was the operational element that
governed the state of scientific enterprise. Kuhn notes in particular that the observed
phenomena are not necessarily the variable when identifying major shifts in the
conclusions of scientific communities. Instead, Kuhn draws upon an analogy from
gestalt psychology—a set of lines which, according to perspective, may appear as a duck
or as a rabbit.82
Gestalt psychology proposes that the human eye and mind perceive objects
80
Ibid., 4.
81
Ibid., 5.
82
For an explanation of Kuhn's exposure to and dependence upon gestalt psychology, see
(Ibid., viii).
43. 43
first as wholes, and subsequently as parts. As a tool, gestalt psychologists employ
illustrations which may be perceived in multiple ways, dependent upon the perspective of
the viewer. The most famous among these is the duck/rabbit illustration. In reality
nothing more than a series of lines, the duck/rabbit illustration demonstrates the
importance of perspective in creating meaning. Kuhn’s use of the duck/rabbit illustration
highlights the constancy of objects of study, and the inconstancy of perspectives borne
upon those objects. When Galileo perceived a pendulum where the Aristotelian
perceived a heavy body moving to a state of rest with difficulty, Kuhn asks,
Why did that shift of vision occur? Through Galileo’s individual genius, of course.
But note that genius does not here manifest itself in more accurate or objective
observation of the swinging body. Descriptively, the Aristotelian perception is just
as accurate… Rather, what seems to have been involved was the exploitation by
genius of perceptual possibilities made available by a medieval paradigm shift.83
In other words, Kuhn attributed the major shift in scientific conclusions not to the
accuracy or abundance of data, but rather to a shift in the paradigm of a scientific
community. Kuhn suggests that “normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation
of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.”84
Just as gestalt
psychology proposes, Kuhn suggests that the paradigm of a scientific community dictates
the shape of the conclusions of that scientific community—that the scientist perceives the
whole of the data according to a pre-set perspective, and utilizes that whole to interpret
the meaning of the parts. The goal of the scientific enterprise, then, is to actualize the
paradigm at hand. “To scientists, at least, the results gained in normal research are
significant because they add to the scope and precision with which the paradigm can be
83
Ibid., 119.
84
Ibid., 24.
44. 44
applied.”85
Kuhn’s proposal, therefore, is that the paradigm of a scientific community
orchestrates the methods, rules, and conclusions of the scientific community in an act of
self-promotion—verifying the tenants of the paradigm, explaining anomalies which defy
the paradigm, and suggesting extensions of the paradigm into new areas of study.
Kuhn further admits that his conception of paradigm, and his suggestion of
ways which paradigm orchestrates research and assigns meaning to data, operates almost
like a worldview. By influencing interpretation of fact, by isolating strata of appropriate
questions and answers, and by enumerating rules of investigation, the paradigm functions
to create meaning on higher cognitive levels. Paradigm operates as an “inverted lens,” he
suggests, training the bearer to interpret perceptions according to a set matrix.
Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like
the man wearing inverting lenses. Confronting the same constellation of objects as
before and knowing that he does so, he nevertheless finds them transformed through
and through in many of their details.86
Kuhn further elucidates that
the operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not
“the given” of experience, but rather “the collected with difficulty.” They are not
what the scientist sees—at least not before his research is well advanced and his
attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more
elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of
normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration
of an accepted paradigm.87
Kuhn’s association of paradigm with worldview, and the outworking of that association
as articulated above, establishes a close parallel to the construction of narrative and the
scientific endeavor. This association thereby operates as a hinge upon which the
85
Ibid., 36
86
Ibid., 122.
45. 45
consequences and implications of Kuhn’s findings may establish a correlation of
paradigm with the act of narrative composition.
Paradigmatic Imagination’s Role in Narrative Composition
The act of composition, especially the composition of narrative, is similar to
the act of scientific investigation as Kuhn describes it.88
Kuhn summarizes the act of
scientific inquiry thus:
Normal science consists in the actualization of [the paradigm’s] promise, an
actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of [related] facts that the
paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match
between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of
the paradigm itself.89
In other words, scientific inquiry sets as its goal the actualization or verification of the
governing paradigm. In order to accomplish this actualization, the scientist proposes
correlations of relevant facts (as dictated by the paradigm) whose mere relation further
establishes the expectations of the paradigm. Once the relationship between data is
established, the conclusion of scientific inquiry is the validation or actualization of the
paradigm’s promises. In other words, in its most basic form, scientific inquiry is defined
by the act of establishing correlations between data in order to confirm a paradigm-
dictated hypothesis. The methods of scientific inquiry involve, in a most fundamental
sense, the proposition of a theory and the validation of that theory through collection and
________________________
87
Ibid., 126.
88
An important clarification is warranted. This thesis will first establish a correlation of
Kuhn's proposal with the composition of historical narrative as a genre. That is, the subject at hand initially
is the composition of secular historical narrative. The next section will address the unique facets of
canonical historical narrative.
89
Ibid., 24.
46. 46
correlation of data. This process will be referred to as the proposition-correlation-
confirmation model.
The proposition-correlation-confirmation model is nearly identical to the
methodology of literary composition, particularly that of historical narrative. V. Phillips
Long, in an essay analyzing the task of historians and the conception of narrative,
establishes a helpful analogy to illuminate the narrative-construction process:
Historians, as verbal representational artists, find themselves in a position analogous
to that of visual representational artists. The latter can paint a number of different
pictures of a single subject, no two of which are alike, but this does not mean that
the subject itself lacks inherent structure or that the artists are unconstrained by the
facts… Just as the physical world does not present itself in such a way that no
creative choices are required of artists who would depict some aspect of it, so the
past does not present itself in such a way that historians need make no creative
choices in the construction of a historical account of some aspect of it.90
Long proposes that the composition of historical narrative is a creative endeavor. It
involves a series of choices. The author of historical narrative operates with a blank
canvas, and his representation of the past is unique, a feature of the choices he has made
to accomplish his narrative purpose. Just as a visual artist is by degrees constrained by
his subject matter, the author of historical narrative is anchored to reality on multiple
levels.91
Yet the author of historical narrative, so constrained, initiates the act of
composition by making a series of creative choices according to a single, orchestrating
purpose.92
90
V. Philips Long, "History and Fiction: What is History?" in Israel's Past in Present
Research (Winona Lake: Eisenbraums, 1999), 243.
91
Long suggests that the choices involved in the composition of historical narrative are
constrained by three factors: “The historiographical implies constraint by the subject, the theological
implies point of view, and the literary implies aesthetic choices” (Ibid). Original emphasis.
92
For a stimulating survey of the contemporary debate on narrative construction and historical
accuracy, see Hayden White, "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory," History and
47. 47
To clarify, the proposition-correlation-validation model is represented in
literary composition and scientific enquiry. It may be helpful to quickly identify the
nuances of the model in each discipline. In scientific enquiry, a proposal to be tested is
referred to as the hypothesis. The hypothesis represents an aspect of the scientist’s
paradigm which remains to be validated, or which may deserve further validation. The
submission of a hypothesis for testing is the proposition phase of the model. The
gathering and correlation of data using a variety of relevant tools and methods is the
correlation phase of the model. The confirmation or rejection of the hypothesis, and
thereby the validation or adjustment of that aspect of the author’s paradigm is the
validation phase of the model. In literary compostion, an author sets out to validate an
aspect of his paradigm—to represent objects or persons as having some deeper,
transcendent meaning. The articulation, explicit or implicit, of a literary strategy to
validate this aspect is the proposition phase of the model. The association of people,
words, ideas, objects, or events in order to demonstrate this transcendent meaning is the
correlation phase of the model. Finally, the explicit articulation of the deeper meaning of
these phenomena, through editorial or concluding notes, or through application
statements, explicit or implicit, represent the validation phase (or, as it may be called in
literary works, the demonstration phase) of the model. A further explanation of these
three phases in narrative composition may be warranted.
The first step in the composition of historical narrative is to establish a purpose
for composition. The purpose of composition is the literary strategy of the work. The
specified purpose of the work correlates directly to the aforementioned proposition phase
________________________
Theory 23, no. 1 (February 1984), 1-33.
48. 48
of scientific enquiry. When an author sets out to depict the past, he does so for a purpose.
This purpose, just as the proposition phase of scientific enquiry, sets out to validate or
demonstrate an aspect of the author’s paradigm. This literary strategy also dictates the
subsequent compositional decisions. Every detail, every narrative unit, every character,
every analogy and metaphor, will be included as a means accomplishing the literary
strategy of the narrative and thereby validating the paradigm of the author. The paradigm
of the author, likewise, functions to establish and suggest correlation between events,
perceptions, and concepts. The paradigm, then, dictates the literary strategy of a
narrative, even if that paradigm isn’t explicitly present within the text. In other words,
the paradigmatic imagination operates to establish meaning from related and seemingly
unrelated phenomena. As such, the paradigm of an author is the filter through which past
events are interpreted or correlated. The author of historical narrative, then, sees events
as meaningful, and is compelled to represent events as meaningful, because the author’s
paradigm has identified them as such.
The second stage in the composition of historical narrative parallels the
correlation stage of scientific enquiry. Having established a literary strategy for the
narrative, the author chooses from a spectrum of historical episodes, characters,
conversations, relationships, and documents to include in the narrative itself. This is the
raw data of the narrative. This act of selection is governed by the purposes of the author
for the narrative. The author seeks to demonstrate effectively an aspect of his paradigm,
and chooses narrative units accordingly. These narrative units may be comprised of
personal memories, contemporary reports and documents, or other authoritative histories.
In biblical narrative, the author may cite or allude to other sacred literature in composing
49. 49
narrative units. In every case, however, those narrative units are only included because
they help to accomplish the literary strategy of the narrative and thereby actualize the
paradigm of the author. Selection of narrative units, however, is only complete when
those units are correlated in some way. Arrangement, emphasis, and editorial
commentary are all ways in which the author may establish correlation between narrative
units. Such correlation is likewise governed by the literary strategy of the work.
Commentary, selection, arrangement, and emphasis are never arbitrary in historical
narrative. Rather, these represent the orchestrating influence of the paradigmatic
imagination, which teaches the author the meaning of past events. The author’s paradigm
functions to establish relationships between events, personalities, and conversations
within the author’s memory; an extension of that act of synthesis is represented by the
correlation phase of the composition of historical narrative.93
The final phase in the construction of historical narrative parallels the
validation phase of scientific enquiry. While often implied in the narrative text itself, the
validation phase expresses the conclusions of the narrative, primarily by dictating the
meaning of the collected narrative units. This purpose-dictated validation phase serves to
actualize whatever aspect of the paradigm influenced the construction of the narrative
itself. Often the validation phase involves a call to the recipient audience to adopt some
aspect of the author’s paradigm and interpret historical and contemporary events
accordingly. As mentioned above, such validation is often implied, but explicit
93
“The function of narrative form is not just to relate a succession of events but to present an
ensemble of interrelationships of many different kinds as a single whole. Historical understanding converts
congeries of events into concatenations. While in fictional narrative the coherence of the whole may
provide aesthetic or emotional satisfaction, in historical narrative it additionally claims truth” (K. Lawson
Younger, "The Underpinnings," in Israel's Past in Present Research, ed. Long, V. Philips [Winona Lake:
50. 50
validation may appear as an editorial comment, as poetic verse, or as a proverbial note.
Typically the validation appears in the praise or rejection of certain characteristics
represented by characters within the unfolding narrative. These demonstrate the author’s
paradigm by isolating behavioral patterns which coincide with positive elements within
the author’s worldview. The paradigm of the author dictates the means and methods of
validation in each historical narrative. When the validation texts are present, they
explicitly actualize the author’s paradigm, and are thus valuable texts to discover the
author’s paradigmatic imagination at work within a narrative.
Unique Dynamics in the Interpretation of Biblical Narrative
As mentioned above, the paradigmatic imagination governs the selection,
emphasis, and arrangement of historical narrative. One of the goals of this thesis is to
suggest ways in which the reader might reverse-engineer the selection, arrangement, and
emphasis of narrative units in order to isolate the biblical author’s governing paradigm.
Before this can be accomplished, however, it may be appropriate to further elucidate the
process of selection, arrangement, and emphasis in the construction of biblical historical
narrative. The final form of the canonical text represents an amalgam of historical
episodes, characters, dialogue, sacred poetry and proverb, commentary, and legislation.
The unique nature of their context and source materials may help to clarify the task of
biblical interpretation.94
________________________
Eisenbrauns, 1999], 323).
94
Michael H. Burer, "Narrative Genre: Studying the Story," in Interpreting the New Testament
Text, ed. Darrell L. Bock (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2006), 205.
51. 51
The author of biblical historical narrative is at the same time more privileged
and more constrained than secular historians. They are more privileged because they
have access to sacred documents—documents with which their readers were almost
certainly familiar—with which to recall themes, build emphasis, and elucidate purpose.
These sacred texts simultaneously give authority to the narrative text in composition and
ground that text in a history of sacred revelation. The citation of and allusion to sacred
texts in biblical narrative highlights the continuity God’s merciful self-revelation, and
thus grant immediate authority to biblical historical narrative texts. The privilege of
biblical authors also symbolizes their constraint: composition of canonical texts,
anchored with the authority and continuity of the Scriptures, constrains the author to
theological consistency and historical accuracy. The biblical narrative texts represent the
world as it is. Such consistency serves the reader in two ways. First, the reader need not
consider manipulation of the historical record, or intentional deception, as a narrative
strategy of the biblical authors. Second, should the reader stumble over an obscure text,
such a text may be clarified, with every warrant, by the canonical texts which preceded it,
as the author, in most cases, presupposed his audience’s exposure to canonical texts.95
Indeed, the sacred texts to which the author refers may directly represent aspects of the
authors paradigm which are essential to the task of interpretation.
A unique aspect of interpretation of biblical narratives is the necessary
consideration of canonical goals and purposes. Because they participate in a canonical
statement, the biblical narratives are not entirely unique. Simply because of shared trust
95
Robert L. Plummer, "How Do We Interpret Historical Narratives?," in 40 Questions about
Interpreting the Bible (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2010), 193.
52. 52
in the God of Israel, and exposure to the canonical testimony of preceding sacred works,
the authors of biblical historical narrative share aspects of a communal paradigm, though
such a paradigm certainly develops progressively.96
For this reason the purposes of
biblical historical narratives often overlap. The inclusion or arrangement of narrative
units in the Pentateuch, for example, may be attributed to a similar literary strategy as
that which dictates the selection and arrangement in the Judges narrative. So the
interpreter of biblical narrative must, to some degree, be canonically conscious. The
reader of biblical narrative ought to consider the influence and purposes of preceding
canonical works in order to appropriately estimate the paradigm which governs the
structure of the text at hand.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the reader must consider the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit in the composition of canonical narrative. While the nature of the role
of the Holy Spirit in the inspiration of Scripture remains disputed grounds within
Christian theology, few conservative exegetes deny the relevance of the Holy Spirit’s
influence upon the task of interpretation.97
This thesis adopts a verbal/plenary approach
to inspiration, and thus assumes that the Holy Spirit so illuminates the author’s mind, and
by extension his paradigm, that the author’s interpretation and articulation of past events
96
This is not to say that the canonical authors transcend the normal dynamics of the human
mind, or that they tap into some communal paradigm in the process of construction. Rather, this is simply
affirming that the paradigm of each canonical author includes major aspects which govern their purposes
for composition. When the reader attempts to understand these canonical works, these major elements
ought to be considered.
97
A concise review of noteworthy positions may be identified in David S. Dockery and David
P. Nelson, "Special Revelation," in A Theology for the Church, ed. Daniel Akin (Nashville: B&H
Academic, 2007), 150-55.
53. 53
is precisely that which the Holy Spirit intended.98
The Holy Spirit, it must be noted, does
not override the mind, paradigm, or personality of the author. Rather, the Holy Spirit
teaches the author an appropriate assessment of their world and past in such a manner
that even their word choice may be called “the word of God.” For the purposes of this
thesis, it must be noted that the author’s paradigm, as it relates to the composition of
canonical narrative, is a perfect assessment of the past, because it is God’s assessment of
the past. Functionally, the author’s paradigm mirrors God’s paradigm.
Isolating the Author’s Paradigm
Now that the nuances of paradigm and the paradigmatic imagination have been
applied to the act of composition, and the distinction has been clarified which separates
the interpretation of secular historical narrative from canonical historical narrative, this
section may proceed to illustrate the means by which the reader might “reverse-engineer”
narrative units for the purpose of identifying the biblical author’s governing paradigm.
Thus illuminated, the reader may turn again, paradigm in mind, to accurately identify the
meaning of each narrative unit independently, and the narrative as a whole.
The subsequent sections will employ the concepts of paradigm and
paradigmatic imagination to the task of interpreting biblical narrative texts according to
composition criticism. Composition criticism, as mentioned above, investigates narrative
units as parts of a narrative whole in an attempt to
describe the literary strategy of a biblical book… Moreover, it attempts to
understand the theological characteristics of the smaller and larger compositions and
98
A defense of the verbal/plenary approach is outside of the scope of this paper. However,
such a defense is included in Dockery’s survey (Ibid., 154.)
54. 54
the direction, goal, and tendency of the author of the whole work.99
It recognizes each biblical narrative not as “unintentional juxtaposition, but the
purposeful interweaving of the parts into the whole.”100
Any time two units are placed next to one another, the meaning of each is
affected… The meaningful and purposeful structure of the collection [of narrative
units into a cohesive whole] reveals intentional composition, which leads to the task
of a compositional approach.101
The remainder of this thesis will thus attempt to utilize the tools of the compositional
approach to isolate the “literary strategy,” or purpose, of the work. Paradigm and literary
strategy are closely related, because literary strategy, the propositional element of
narrative construction, attempts to actualize an aspect of the author’s paradigm. The
literary strategy of an author therefore illuminates relevant aspects of the author’s
governing paradigm and thus strengthens and simplifies the act of interpreting narrative
units.
Purpose Statements in Narrative
The most explicit representation of the literary strategy of an author of
canonical narrative is a purpose statement. Because the purpose statement highlights and
outlines the literary strategy of the author, and implicitly represents that aspect of the
author’s paradigm which the narrative is attempting to actualize and demonstrate,
purpose statements ought to govern the interpretation of every narrative unit within a
work. Unfortunately, purpose statements are rarely made explicit in canonical narrative.
99
Sailhamer, 98.
100
McKinion, 52.
101
Ibid.
55. 55
So this section will first suggest ways to isolate explicit purpose statements in biblical
narrative, and subsequently suggest ways to discover the literary strategy of a biblical
narrative when that strategy is implied by the use of a variety of literary devices.
A shining example of an explicit purpose statement in canonical narrative may
be found in John 20:30-31:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not
written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.102
John’s literary strategy is made explicitly clear in this narrative unit, which itself serves
to represent the propositional and the validation/actualization phase of narrative
composition. D.A. Carson explains the flow of thought in this passage:
The flow of thought seems to be: Those who have not seen the risen Christ and yet
have believed are blessed; therefore this book has been composed to the end that
you may believe. The first of two particles (men) is paired with de introducing v.
31. Together, they frame the thought of these two verses: On the one hand, there
are, doubtless, many more signs Jesus did that could have been reported; but, on the
other, these have been committed to writing so that you may believe.103
Noteworthy in this text is the author’s explicit admission of omission. He confesses that
the record he has produced does not begin to relate the entirety of Christ’s ministry.
Rather, John has meticulously pieced together this narrative for one orchestrating
purpose. Leon Morris captures the intentionality of John’s purpose statement:
In this statement of intention John first makes it clear that in his Gospel he has made
a selection. He has not by any means written all that he knows about Jesus…He has
written what served his purpose and has omitted much… Now John gives us the
purpose of his book, that purpose which he has had steadily in his mind from the
102
This and all subsequent citations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the English
Standard Version (ESV).
103
D.A Carson, The Gospel According to John (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1991), 661.
56. 56
beginning.104
Again, R.C. Sproul summarizes John’s words: “John is saying: ‘I have provided this
record for a reason—that my readers may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God.”105
The literary strategy of John’s gospel, then, is to compel readers to believe that
Jesus is the Christ, a faith that yields life. The reader is then compelled to revisit the
narrative with such a purpose in mind. Every element of his narrative, John admits, has
been selected and arranged to accomplish this purpose. Therefore, every narrative unit
may thus be interpreted.
Yet purpose statements are rarely as explicit as John 20:30-31. In most
instances, purpose statements are either implied by the use of literary devices, or more
subtly presented in narrative commentary, suggesting an interpretation of individual
narrative units or a series of events. “For,” “therefore,” “so that,” and “in order that”
clauses typically precede narrative commentary. These clauses highlight the author’s
attempt to guide the reader’s interpretation of individual narrative units. Such attempts
represent at least one aspect of the literary strategy of the work, and may provide valuable
clues for macro-narrative interpretation. In most cases, however, the literary strategy of
the work is implied by the use of a variety of literary devices. The remainder of this
section will be devoted to suggesting ways that a reader may interpret the use of literary
devices
Determining Purpose According to Selection
104
Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, The New International Commentary on the
New Testament, ed. F.F. Bruce (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1971), 855.
105
R.C Sproul, John, St. Andrews Expositional Commentary (Orlando: Reformation Trust,
2010), 394.
57. 57
The literary strategy of a canonical narrative becomes evident through
investigating even the most basic compositional choices, such as selection and
arrangement of narrative units. As above, the object which the author intends to depict is
some portion of the past, and the past provides innumerable historical episodes which the
author may include in his narrative— those available from his own memory, from
authoritative sources, from poetic or proverbial material; selection represents those
necessary compositional decisions to limit the focus and boundaries of the narrative so as
to accomplish most efficiently and effectively the purpose of the author. The Chronicles
narrative offers the clearest glimpse of source selection and dependence in canonical
narrative. An investigation into the source-selection of the Chronicler may identify the
literary strategy of the Chronicles narrative. Such a practice may in turn highlight ways
in which selection conveys the literary strategy of a narrative text.
That Chronicles represents the piecing together of, and often reinterpretation
of, antecedent canonical narratives is not only widely recognized, but also textually
verified.
By the time the author of Chronicles wrote, much of the literature that we associate
with the Hebrew Bible was already written. Chronicles draws extensively upon
these rich literary traditions…The dependence upon Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and
Joshua is evident in the genealogies (1 Chr 1-9), the dependence upon Samuels is
patent in the narration of Saul’s demise and of David’s reign (1 Chr 10-29), and the
dependence upon Kings is unmistakable in the narration of Solomon and the
kingdom of Judah (2 Chr 1-36). In each case, the book quotes extensively from
earlier materials.106
Indeed, one of the plaguing questions in the study of 1 & 2 Chronicles is the apparent
inconsistency with which it cites or alludes to antecedent canonical narrative. While
106
Gary N. Knoppers, 1 Chronicles 1-9, The Anchor Bible, ed. William Foxwell Albright
(New York: Random House, 2004), 62.
