Plato refused to allow poets a place in his ideal society. He saw them as ‘liars’. Aristotle differed. He took the view that poets brought home by imitation not a lie but a truth. Poetry was more than fabrication. For poetry read novels, film-scripts and tale-telling. The argument has stretched over two millennia. It continues to be about truth as expressed on the screen or in best-selling paperbacks. It is about the validity of imaginative literature as opposed to prosaic reporting.
The question of validity is of supreme concern to those approaching scriptural documents. They contain prosaic reporting (or something very much like it) and there is also poetry. Sometimes, as in all other aspects of life, the two are not clearly differentiated. We – readers, hearers and viewers – are not just clinical observers. We become involved. We take sides. If this were not so, we should have to say that George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, for instance, was no more worthwhile than Conan Doyle’s fairies. It actually offers an aspect of truth under an imaginative guise. The book of Job (laboriously perhaps) does the same thing.
A reader of the Bible has to be discriminating. It is a matter amongst other things of recognising the many guises under which truth reaches us. The Bible is something more than a road-sign which is either informative or mandatory. A biblical text can be those things but it can also be oblique, indirect, evocative. Jesus was a master of tale-telling and the enduring popularity of the story of the good Samaritan is evidence that this is a means of conveying or inspiring truth and understanding.
Bibles with yapp covers and burnished edges mask the true nature of the Bible. It is in fact a collection of disparate documents – legal codes, sagas, parables, allegories, songs, apocalyptic. We have to respect the balancing act required by attention to form and content. Truth is many-splendoured and it takes more than prosaic reporting to do justice to it. As Benjamin Jowett put it, I believe, we must read the Bible as we read any other book and we must read the Bible as we read no other book. Much trouble has been caused by failure to do this.
‘NOT PERFECT’
‘Don’t expect us to be perfect and have all the answers,’ is a refreshing self-description by Holy Trinity church, Seaton Carew, Hartlepool. Much improvement to the church building has been made since it was built in 1831. Philip Bullock is the incumbent.
UNDAUNTED RAYLEIGH
Despite not having a team rector and a team vicar Rayleigh parish church Essex, is undaunted. It is coping with a £551k scheme to improve the lighting, heating, decorations etc and to replace a worn-out pipe organ by a digital instrument. Replacing pews by chairs will come later.
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