Karen Armstrong’s clarion call in her study, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts (Alfred Knopf, 2019), is for exploring the human brain’s potential to think of something that does not exist. She cites as an example the ivory figurine, Lion Man, in the Ulm Museum, which may be the earliest known evidence of human religious activity, dating back 40,000 years. Discovered in the Stadel Cave in southern Germany, likely set apart as a cultic site, the hybrid creature “transcends anything in our empirical experience but seems to reflect a sense of the underlying unity of animal, human, and the divine.” Such religious imagination “reflects a holistic rather than an analytical vision; it sees each thing in relation to the whole and perceives the interconnectedness of reality.”
Armstrong further argues that unlike science, religious literature (scripture) always had a moral dimension and was essentially a summons to compassionate, altruistic action and, thus, the art of scripture was designed to help human beings to achieve radical spiritual transformation. The current issue of BTB provides five instances of the art of religious imagination.
Bart B. Bruehler, in “Sacred Stories for Human Beings with Bodies and Brains,” employs a hermeneutical perspective that integrates the activation of our bodies and brains as part of human beings’ holistic response to narratives and provides both a fuller understanding of sacred stories and a suitable ground for analyzing the work of ethical formation that can be done by these stories.
Paul K Moser proposes that if we approach Biblical theology through divine moral inspiration, we not only get a unified storyline that has been neglected, but also a Biblical theology that admits of needed testing in moral experiment for God’s reality and goodness.
Jonathan P. Guervara, in “The Parable of the Tenants as a Sociolinguist Medium of Agrarian Revolution,” concludes that when we accept that the parable of the tenants as a ‘realistic fiction,’ we are compelled to understand that the social environment of the Jesus movement is realistically revolutionary. The structure and content of the parable and its propagation in oral tradition demonstrate an ideology most consistent with one of the fundamental goals of agrarian revolution: seizure of landed property. Thus, sociolinguistically it is a ‘religious fiction’ that belongs to an ideological orientation that manifests revolutionary tendencies.
Adam White, in “Setting the Boundaries: Reading 1 Timothy and Titus as Community Charters,” observes, “…in all of these examples, we find formal instructions and regulations for various aspects of the community’s life. The parallels between the charters in associations and the Essene community and the instructions in 1 Timothy and Titus are striking. In all cases, they address issues of leadership, member support, entry, personal lives of members, and rules for meetings. And in some cases, they present very similar instruction.”
Brian Schmisek, in “The Quartodeciman Question: Johannine Roots of a Christian Controversy,” identifies a group or sect of Christians clustered in and around Asia Minor who insisted on commemorating the 14th of Nisan rather than Easter Sunday for the mystery of the resurrection of the Lord from the dead on a Sunday. For them, the celebration of Pascha on 14 Nisan is more directly linked to the early Christian community with its Jewish roots in Jerusalem.
In all of these, there is a real-life situation that goes through a transformational process to produce a higher purpose, often with a moral tone. The interpretations exemplify the art of scriptural interpretation, rendering the concrete situation with a religious aura that transforms the concrete situation by linking it to a higher realm of meaning.
