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Fragmentation of Scripture
I'm currently reading Practicing Gospel by Edward Farley. Farley takes some fairly radical stances on how the Gospel is preached in our western culture. Many of his arguments would most likely make many uncomfortable as he forces us to rethink much of what we've grown up with or the tradition we've taken for granted. This is not to say that his argument is not a valid argument, although I'm not sure I completely agree with all his conclusions in the book.
However, one point that Farley brings up that really caused the wheels in my head to turn was the fragmentation of scripture. Farley examines the effects of breaking all of scripture up into neat little verses that are then each studied apart from their whole.
"Surely we can be moved and influenced by the Illiad, King Lear, or The Color Purplewithout dividing these great works into pericopes and assigning a necessary truth to each one. Why must this be done to Jeremiah or Paul? Ironically, the effect of this atomism and leveling of Scripture into passages is to suppress the power and beauty of that literature. If the Bible is not, in fact, an aggregate of 'passages' or texts (even asKing Lear and The Color Purple are not), then to construe it as such is to distort it. To see a letter of Paul, a Gospel, or a prophetic tract as an aggregate of discrete units is surely to miss the writing as an argument, a polemic, a set of imageries, a theological perspective, a narrative. The very thing that gives the writing its power is its unity, its total concrete vision, its total movement."
Practicing Gospel by Edward Farley p. 76
Apart from the convenience of pin pointing a place in scripture does fragmenting the content into small parts help or hurt it's true meaning? A major portion of the New Testament was written as letters to people or churches with an overall meaning, and many many times we dissect these letters and pull out only fragments to be used on a Sunday morning. Are we doing more harm than good? Are we in a sense changing the original meaning the author had when writing the literary piece? You may or may not have thought through this before, but I encourage you to respond through a comment or an email and let me know your take or your thoughts. If I've caused you to think through your understanding and to grow in that understanding then I've accomplished my goal in this writing.
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Blando's Blog
Disciple of Christ, Husband, Father, and IT-guy.
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