Big Questions: Who Am I Meeting?

We’re in the midst of a series of posts about the big questions I feel are important to ask so we can get the most out of our Scripture reading. The first two were components of the ‘Experience’ step of the Integral Hermeneutic method through which we’re working. Today’s post moves on to the simplest, but a nonetheless important, step: Encounter. It asks Who am I meeting in this text? What are their concerns? What are their perspectives? Their agendas?

The answers to such questions are going to vary a lot depending on literary genre. A self-contained narrative, like a legend, folktale, or Gospel story, may have many characters; in the case of a Parable, it will also have a speaker and an audience, who are also important. In an Epistle reading, we mostly meet the author and implicitly his intended reader. A proverb may not have anyone at all to encounter, since this genre leans so heavily into the universal, but even this can be helpful information when we look to interpret and apply a particular text.

Stepping back a bit, let’s go into a bit of basic literary theory. Every text has an actual author or editor (the person(s) who created the text), an implied author (the version of the author we imagine as readers), an implied reader (the version of the audience we imagine as readers), and an actual reader (us). Taking a book like Ecclesiastes as an example, we have no idea who the actual author is (tradition says it was Solomon but this is based purely on the fact that it’s a book of Wisdom and King Solomon was said to be wise). The implied author is a teacher, likely of old age, wanting to impart wisdom about the good life to his students (who are the implied reader). And, we are the actual reader today. (There is an additional complication here, in that the writer himself had an implied reader who likely differed in some way from his original actual reader, apart from us as the actual reader today. So, for example, the writer of Ecclesiastes may have imagined a curious reader passionate about the philosophy of right living; his original actual reader (whom we can only reconstruct as an implied reader today) may have been like this, or perhaps a bored and bratty rich kid with no interest in self-improvement.)

This gets more complex in stories, as there is also a narrator (who may or may not be the ‘author’), narratee (who may or may not be either the implied or actual reader), as well as the characters of the story. So if we look again at the story of the Hospitality of Abraham, we have the actual author (likely an unknowable group of successive editors), the implied author (whoever it is we imagine ‘wrote’ Genesis — traditionally Moses), an implied reader (an ancient Israelite or Judahite), and the actual reader (us). Characters in the story include YHWH (visiting in the form of an angel), Abraham, and Sarah. In this case, the narrator and narratee are likely identical to the implied author and reader of Genesis. But if we look at one of Jesus’ parables, We have the Gospel writer as the actual author (even if we believe he is accurately reflecting Jesus’ words), and the version of the author we conjure up from the Gospel itself as the implied author (so, for example, the Gospel of Luke highlights marginalized voices in a way the others do not, so we infer something about Luke from that — rightly or wrongly!). But the narrator is Jesus, since the parable is put in his lips. The narratee is his audience, generally the disciples but perhaps a group of religious leaders or a crowd of mixed people. The implied reader is whatever first-century Christian community to whom the Gospel was written, and we are the actual reader today. The parables themselves have characters, such as the father and faithless and faithful sons in the Prodigal Son.

And, of course, because we read these texts as Sacred Scripture, we believe we can in some mysterious way encounter God in them too. Sometimes God will be a ‘character’ in the text; sometimes, as in the Prophets, God may be a narrator; but often God will be somewhere behind the implied author as the text’s divine inspirer.

So the question of ‘Who am I meeting?’ in a given text is a deceptively simple one. We often meet a lot of figures, about whom we may know a lot or nothing at all.

But, we might ask why this matters at all. First and foremost, we read the Bible in order to encounter God in and through it. In some parts of Scripture — the Laws, Prophetic oracles, and words of Jesus, for example — this is straightforward. But in the majority of it, encountering God is a bit more abstract. For as much as we believe God may speak through these texts in a particularly vivid and vital way, they are still historical and human texts, written by, for, and about human persons in human cultures within human history. We ‘meet’ God, then, in what ancient stories say about God, or in what they say about how an ancient people understood God. These intermediaries do not prevent God from speaking to us, but they do require us to take a step back and think things through. To cite a famous example, the words “There is no God” is a direct quote from Scripture (Psalm 14.1), but these are not ‘God’s words’; they are not even the words of the Psalmist (though they are), because they are put into the mouth of a character in the Psalm, ‘the fool’: “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God’.”) In this Psalm, the fool is a character we encounter, and are supposed to learn from, but as a lesson in how not to think and live. Implied audience is also helpful for us to consider when reading our Bibles. For example, when thinking about Paul’s Letter to the Romans, it’s clear that the major question (in Paul’s mind) facing the ‘Church in Rome’ was how Jewish and Gentile Christians were to relate to each other. So the implied reader is a community of Jewish and Gentile Christians struggling to find common cause and unity in the faith. That challenge was the whole reason Paul wrote the letter and so it would be wise for us to keep this in the back of our minds as we read that book. It both helps us to contextualize what Paul is saying and why the book’s argument structure is what it is, and puts a distance between what Paul wanted his implied readers to do and how we should apply that today. Churches today have many problems and a lot of division, but the question of how Jewish and Gentile Christians should live in communion with each other has been a dead issue for roughly 1800 years. That certainly doesn’t mean the letter’s message is irrelevant for us, but it does mean it will be relevant for us in a different way from how it was relevant in the first century.

The point of all this is simply that, as much as we encounter God through the texts of the Bible, that encounter is often mediated through the words, experiences, and stories of other people, people who lived in vastly different times, cultures, and circumstances from our own. So, it’s important for us to take a step back and think about these people: what their assumptions are, what they want, why they are present in our Bible stories, and so on. By better understanding them, we can better understand the texts, and thereby come to encounter God in and through them in a clearer way.

Reflection Questions

1. Thinking of the spectrum of Actual Author > Implied Author > [Narrator > Narratee > ] Implied Reader > Actual Reader, were any of these figures new to you? If so, which ones? And what do you think about them?

2. Who are the people/characters you encounter in the following verses?

a) “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Ephesians 1.1-2)

b) “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. (Isaiah 40.1-2)

c) Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, ‘Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!’ … Jacob said, ‘First sell me your birthright.’ Esau said, ‘I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?’ Jacob said, ‘Swear to me first.’ So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright. (Genesis 25.29-34)

d) But wanting to justify himself, [the lawyer] asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Jesus replied: ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. (Luke 10.29-34)