Edgework

In many circles it is generally accepted that the Bible speaks with one voice. But the fact remains that while the Bible points to some central strands of history, theology and meaning, not all is crystal clear. There appears at times to be a tension between various writers who say different things with varying emphases in various contexts. And these differences often lie at the root of our varying Christian identities.

Multivocality is readily apparent , for example, when one compares the four Gospels in the New Testament. Sometimes we assume that, since all of the Gospels are basically telling the same story, all should be in perfect agreement with respect to story details. We suppose that it can readily be made into one movie version of the Jesus story. When I attended Bible School in the mid-1960s I took a course entitled The Life of Christ which was based on this assumption. We spent a lot of time manipulating the various texts to come up with one precise order of events in the life of Jesus. It was comforting to think that such precision was possible. After all, it was the Word of God.

In my later studies, I simply could not maintain, let alone advocate, such a univocal approach to the Gospels. No doubt all of the gospel writers drew on oral tradition and possibly from earlier written documents we don’t know about. But all tell the Jesus story differently, with varying emphases and in some cases even contradicting each other with respect to details. An assignment I often gave first-year college students was to read the four resurrection accounts and then produce one “movie version” of what actually happened. Many came back somewhat bewildered by the fact that this was impossible. For some it even triggered a crisis of faith. How, they wondered, could they trust the Bible to be the Word of God if it could not agree with itself?

However, this exercise prepared students to study each Gospel for what it was worth. They discovered that each Gospel was written by a unique individual addressing a targeted audience for a particular purpose. Apparently each writer felt free to draw on the larger body of common knowledge about the Jesus story and to put it together in a unique way to make a unique point. For me, this approach brought a new life to the Gospels, especially when I began teaching the Gospel of Mark as a complete course. Knowing that each of the Gospels was more than a random collection of stories and sayings about Jesus helped me to see how each Gospel had been constructed to communicate effectively to differing audiences. Dropping the need to “harmonize” everything in all the Gospels, the various accounts came alive in a “non-technical” way and helped me to listen more closely to what was being communicated.  I could assure students that our faith did not stand or fall on the basis of perfect harmony within the four Gospels.

Another phenomenon pointing to multivocality in the biblical text emerges when it becomes obvious that different readers in different times and circumstances draw different messages from the same text. Most of us have experienced how a text takes on new or at least different levels of meaning with repeated readings, especially when life circumstances change. In The Bible Made Impossible (2011), Christian Smith says he has heard at least seventeen differing applications arising from the story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well in John 4:1-42. Is the point of the story to encourage us to get out of our comfort zones, to champion feminist agenda, to tell us that Jesus loves us even though he knows all about us, to demonstrate the effectiveness of friendship evangelism, to encourage us to try to break down racial barriers in our communities, or what?

Smith goes on to say, “Such different readings of scripture indeed are possible because the texts themselves are multivocal, polysemic and multivalent” (50). And further, he notes that, “As a result, while any given text clearly cannot be well interpreted as saying just any old thing at all, like a ‘wax nose,’ most texts can still be reasonably read to be saying more than one thing, conveying more than one meaning” (51).

Multivocalitiy is not present only in the Gospels. Peter, Paul, James and John don’t always say the same things in their letters. Peter even complains that some of Paul’s ideas are hard to understand (I Peter 3:16). As moderns we often have a need to try to make everyone say the same thing at the same time. However, I think that the biblical writers would feel a need to be heard for what they are saying in their particular way in the context of unique circumstances and in ways that are consistent with their experiences and personalities. Is it not our responsibility to allow them to be who they are: human instruments seeking to bear witness to the Jesus event – as varied and “human” as that process might be?

Speaking about this same dynamic in the Old Testament, Christopher Wright says in, Old Testment Ethics for the People of God, “We are listening, not to a single voice, not even to a single choir in harmony, but to several choirs singing different songs with protest groups jamming in the wings” (444).

Such an understanding is a far cry from declaring that one can open the Bible at any point and find on that particular page a message speaking directly into one’s life. So instead of seeking for a singular voice throughout Scripture, we must hold the various voices in tension even as we hold the vicissitudes of our human existence in tension. Those who wish to create perfect harmony and symmetry, either in the Bible or in personal experience, need to perform squeaky maneuvers that soon become apparent to discerning persons for what they are.