I should begin this (way too long) post with some explanation of what I do believe. It shouldn't necessarily be important to you that I believe this, but it will be helpful for you to know how my predisposition is relevant to the confrontation I am about to relate.

I believe that Revelation is more informative and far more interesting than I was ever taught. I was taught that it was important in a theological way, but I was not told much—certainly not enough—about how its importance should be appreciated in a literary way. I was sternly told not to mess with the content of Revelation, but I was not helped to understand the form of Revelation. I learned since that when Moses wrote the first five books of my Bible he said much more to his contemporaries than he ever did to me.

Poetry and narrative are never just decorative or entrancing ways to convey information; the poetry and the narration are essential to understanding what Moses wants us to know. Without making this post interminable, you can get some idea of the scope of what I mean by reading The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter.

And if you refuse to do even that little thing for me, at least go to the bookstore, find a chair and read through the introduction to his translation of the Pentateuch in The Five Books of Moses.

Read about the hands in the Joseph story.

I say all this to say that if you talk to me about the importance of biblical "story", you will have my interest, and not just because I've grown up reading Æsop and Grimm and Homer and Chaucer and Poe and MacDonald and Twain and Wodehouse and.... You will have my undistracted attention because I've grown up misreading Moses.

_______________

So I'll move this along by telling you I heard that Danielle Shroyer (just back from that happening/ event/gathering in Darkest Minneapolis) was going to be signing her new book at Tuesday's "Very Exciting Meeting of the Cohort".

Emergence right here in Dallas!

So I told my wife she could have my evening crust, I was driving my pickitup truck down to hear the preacherette talk about story. I'll give you a sample of the insights she takes from Moses' exodus story by quoting the close of her second chapter.

Nobody is allowed to get in the way of God's call for us to go. And when we see injustice, we are called to act like Moses and confront the pharaohs of our own day. We are called to be people who practice exodus day after day after day. We have seen freedom fighters decry the pharaoh of American slavery. We have seen Martin Luther King Jr. galvanize the fight against the injustice of racism and suffragettes denounce the injustice of sexism. We can tell stories of economists working in the Two-Thirds World to bring about economic exodus in small villages through sustainable efforts. We can hear about American teenagers emboldened by the plight of child soldiers in Uganda and raising their voices to a shout. In each of these ways, and in countless more, we declare and demand the future of God to be made more present among us. When we practice exodus, we declare our allegiance not to the powers that be but to the God of Green Lights.

I had a reasonable suspicion that Moses would not have recognized his own work in Danielle's book.

But back to the story.

The discussion out on the patio of the Northwest Hwy Tin Star was meandering in a predictable way when the topic of "the Flood Story" came up and the preacherette said that the lesson of the flood story was that "no matter how bad man got", God would not destroy him again.

"But that's not true, is it?" said I.

"What's not true?" said she.

"It's not true that that is the lesson of the Flood Story," said I.

"How do you mean?" asked she.

"Moses didn't tell us any such thing. What he told us was that God set the sign of a covenant in the sky that he would never destroy man with a flood, not that he would never destroy man at all," answered I.

"Well, that is just your interpretation!" accused she.

"That is what the text says!" retorted I.

My mind was immediately taken by two thoughts. First was her complete ignorance of (or dishonesty about) what Moses actually wrote into his Flood story. Second was her unexpected abandonment of the postmodern understanding of texts: like she had some special understanding of Moses' writing. Or even that Moses meant anything at all which we could determine in our unique times.

This from a professing Emergent?!

I went with the first; I mean what's the point in pursuing story if it's just become interpretation? My interest in story took a back seat to my interest in fact, but she persisted in dismissing my reading as mere interpretation. Then she went on to inform everyone at the table that I like to "come and mix things up".

(If an Emergent wishes to reject orthodoxy he is "asking the hard questions" and "challenging our traditional perceptions". If I ask inconvenient questions, I "like to mix things up". As you all know, I do like to mix things up, but I also like to have serious and productive conversations. Which one I get is part of the serendipity of life.)

When I got home I sent her an email which included an excerpt from the Septuagint in which Moses says three times in the space of three sentences how God would not destroy man again with a flood. In Wednesday morning's email she finally agreed that that is what Moses wrote, but then she quoted a second passage which she thought supported her misunderstanding of the first passage.

It's possible she was re-embracing a postmodern hermeneutic, but I had lost interest in this woman's literary insights and I wrote her this reply:

Among mankind's great institutions are the war college and the insane asylum.

It is inevitable that people will disagree. If those people are rational and authentic, some understanding is possible: they can talk about it; if they are irrational and deceptive, then talking is a total waste of time. That's when the war college and the insane asylum come in handy.

Last night you said something that was untrue about God's judgment. When I defended my objection by referring to the actual "flood story" you said that it was merely my interpretation of the story and that you had a different interpretation. (I came home and emailed you the text and you finally agree that it does say what I claimed it said: it was not "my interpretation" of what it said.) But even before we can honestly approach this disagreement there is something even more interesting. If you were an honest person and if you were consistent and rational, you would have accepted "my interpretation" as being just as valid as "your interpretation". You would have said Namaste, you would not have dissolved the importance of story with the word "interpretation" and you'd've avoided an interruption to the more serious conversation about the usefulness of the Biblical narrative.

You pretend that you are open-minded but you are not; yours remains the privileged "interpretation".

So last night was a total waste of time. It was just your chance to dump on your ideological opponents and cast aspersions on hermeneutics, theology, fundamentalism and a few other oversimplifications that polluted the conversation.

But the point remains. Your enemies do not fail to appreciate "story" or "biblical narrative"; what they fail to do is allow you to prejudice the case with a pretense that you have some special appreciation for story that the rest of us do not. You get the story; we get the interpretations.

This really is contemptible, not just because it is a subtle abuse of another human's conscience and faith, but because it ruins whatever valid conclusions we may draw about narrative in Revelation.

I think you should be ashamed of yourself. I know you're not, but I still think you should be.

I also think you are a careless reader. I did not say our discussion was violent; I said our disagreement was violent. If you read the flood story to mean that God promises never to judge mankind again no matter how bad he gets, and if I read the flood story to mean that God will not destroy man again by means of a kataklusmos udatos but that that kataklusmos udatos stands as a precedent for an even greater judgment, then that is as violent a disagreement as we can have. We have read the same story and drawn contrary conclusions.

This really is intolerable, Danielle.

Her reply took me to task for not demonstrating the fruit of the Spirit, and she said that she would not continue this discussion "in this email forum". She suggested we might talk about this over coffee or a meal.

At first I thought to ask her if we could discuss this at a barbecue or during a round of Frisbee golf, but I decided to take Solomon's advice about answering questions.

_______________

All of this is more important than you may think. If we just listen to these people cuss and spout their jargon, we will miss an important fact of our religious life. We are dealing here with a people who claim to have a special appreciation for Story and Narrative and Art, but in story and narrative and art they have no skills. Check out the works of Soupiset, McLaren, Scandrette, and Shroyer.

Shroyer does not have any interest—or competence—in story. Don't take my word for it; read her book or have a young child read her book. People, like Alter, who have an interest in story know what they are talking about. And that knowledge sticks out a mile. I can read Alter for hours and hours and never learn his political commitments.

Shroyer has a need for a pretext, and biblical stories are just a point of departure for conversations about Martin Luther King, Jr., racism, sexism, the Two-Thirds World, sustainability, child soldiers in Uganda, blah, blah, blababa, blaba, blah. She has no interest, as her Sparkhouse sound bite suggests, in our using imagination or in being creative, and she certainly made it clear that there is no room in God's story for me. And I don't take this personally; I'm sure there is no room in God's story for anyone else who insists that the storytellers in the Bible meant what they wrote.

Talking with Emergents is about as hostile and judgmental an experience as approaching the RAs in a fundamentalist Bible college about the possibility of having a kegger in the chapel.

So I didn't get Shroyer to sign my book, and I wasted gas making the trip down to Dallas—which I'm sure was bad for the environment.