If you have not read the previous posts in this series, you may want to do that before continuing with this one.
The Bible contains a variety of literary forms. Story is one of them; in fact, the majority of the Bible is in the form of stories. Leland Ryken quotes Henry R. Luce, founder of Time Magazine, as saying, “Time didn’t start this emphasis on stories about people; the Bible did.” “Narrative,” writes Ryken, “is the dominant form in the Bible.”
Stories come in different types, and the stories of the Bible are no exception. All stories are either tragedy or comedy. Comedy is not humor, as we tend to think of the word. Comedy is a story with a happy ending. A comedy is, as Ryken calls it, a “U-shaped” story, beginning in happy circumstances, then descending into misery, before rising to its happy resolution. Sometimes it skips the first segment, beginning in misery, but the ending is always happy. Tragedy begins in a variety of circumstances, and ends in misery.
Among the tragedies of the Bible are the stories of Saul and Samson. The majority of the Bible’s stories, however, are comedies in which the protagonist or protagonists encounter difficulty and suffering but end in positive circumstances. The Gospels are comedies. Job and Revelation are comedies. The larger story of the Bible is most definitely a comedy.
Stories are also divided into more specific subtypes. One of these is the heroic narrative, which comprises the majority of biblical narratives. Heroic narratives are stories that are built around the life and actions of the protagonist.
So what? Well, if you want to get more than a shallow Veggie Tales-style “moral of the story,” you want to know how meaning is conveyed through stories. Leland Ryken describes the hero of the heroic narrative:
A literary hero or heroine is representative. The purpose behind the storyteller’s selection of specific heroes and events is that they in some sense capture the universal human situation. It is commonplace that whereas the historian tells us what happened, the writer of a literary narrative tells us what happens. The hero of stories in the Bible do more than set the historical record straight. They also are models and paradigms of the religious experience of the human race. They capture what is true for us and for people around us. Characters like Joseph and Ruth and David do not stay within their stories in the Bible; they merge with our own experiences as we begin to “build bridges” between their stories and our own.
Usually such representative heroes are exemplary of some ideal, though they need not be wholly good (in the Bible they rarely are completely idealized). Stories tend to get written about people whose character and exploits we can look up to. The stories of the Bible are no exception. They give us a memorable gallery of moral and spiritual models to emulate. On the other hand, stories can also includes a positive ideal by negative example. They can indirectly encourage good behavior by telling the story of a hero who failed to measure up to such a standard. Some of the most foolish misreadings of biblical stories I have encountered have come from a misguided assumption that we are intended to approve of the behavior of biblical heroes in virtually every episode in which they figure. One of the distinctive features of the Bible is how deeply flawed its heroes and heroines are. The Bible portrays most of its protagonists as Cromwell wished t be painted—warts and all.
Of course, in describing hero stories as moral or spiritual examples, I run the risk of making them appear to be simplistic moral fables. This is emphatically not true of heroic narrative in the Bible. All we need to do is dip into biblical scholarship and literary criticism to sense that these stories are subtle, frequently complex to interpret, and usually characterized by a kind of cryptic understatement or mystery that requires the reader to supply and abundance of interpretation. The moment we reduce the moral or spiritual meaning of the hero’s experience to an ideal, we have turned the story into a platitude and robbed it of its power.
The antidote lies in respecting how stories work. The values or virtues that are inculcated by a hero story like that of Joseph or Ruth are embodied in the protagonists character and life. The strategy of literature is to give form and shape to human experience by projecting it onto a character. A story can communicate truth or reality or knowledge simply by picturing some aspect of human experience. A story conveys truth whenever we can say, “This is the way life is.”
In other words, “the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction” [Flannery O’Connor, Mysteries and Manners, 73]. To say that the story of Abraham embodies an ideal of faith is not to offer that interpretation as a substitute for the story but as a pair of eyes by which to see what the story itself means. As readers we must protect the integrity of the story, while at the same time realizing that “all narrative . . . possesses . . . some quality of the parable” [Frank Kermode, “Interpretive Continuity and the New Testament,” Rariton, Spring 1982, 36].
—Leland Ryken, How to Read the Bible as Literature (Zondervan, 1984), 75–77.
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