Pastor John. Brian N. Tebbutt

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СКАЧАТЬ again, but the metaphorical sense reappears again and again. We do not experience the images solely with cold reason; “Figurative language springs from strong affect.”24 To refresh ourselves at St. John’s well is to need to sense the imagery afresh.

      Metaphors in common usage become faded. So, for example, the word “anatomy” in the title Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design might enter our minds as, say, just meaning “the parts of,” or “the elements in,” or “structure of,” or, picking up the word “design,” “the plan of.” Whereas if the metaphor itself came alive for us, we would be “image-ining” flesh, blood, eyes, sinews, muscle, breath, heart, bone, movement, a living being, sickness, the wrong sort of growth, dying! John’s metaphors are not used merely as illustrations of propositions; they do not simply refer to theological concepts. They are much too dense for that. They are poetic; in imagination we experience a reality beyond our formulations; such experience is authentic. Culturally we have to live with the anomaly of having concrete statements that we do not interpret literally—Jesus as “the Son of God,” or “the Father,” for instance. In getting into John, we continually have to live in the metaphor afresh, without retreating into the fundamentalism of previous eras or contemporary literalism. When everything seems so familiar, we find we have to live on the edge of language.

This seeking of a deeper meaning is not unknown to biblical interpretation. From the earliest Christian times, the text was deemed to have two levels of meaning, a “literal” (historia in Greek) and a “spiritual” (theoria). The latter required insight into the symbolic, the hidden, even esoteric, meaning. “[T]he worldview of the early church led the early Christians to a more introverted attitude that directed their gaze into the world of the soul, which for them was a living reality . . . the early Christian commentators were natural depth psychologists.”25 “What is hidden beneath the literal meaning is not merely another and more hidden meaning, it is also a new and totally different reality . . . It is the divine life itself.”26 So this “interpretation” does involve us in looking back on an ancient text through very modern lenses, and through lenses, in particular, that are therapeutically attuned.

The art of interpretation is called hermeneutics, from the Greek word hermeneuo, “to interpret,” as used by Jesus in Luke 24:27 as he interpreted the scriptures on the way to Emmaus. “Hermeneutics is not simply a task of making a meaning from the text that suits the needs of the readers, nor simply a task of unlocking some a priori meaning ensconced in the text. Rather, hermeneutics is a process in which a unique relationship between text and reader evolves.”27

Speaking of the need to make the old prophetic faith rooted in old treasured texts credible for today, Walter Brueggemann wants the church’s pastoral task to be committed to the hard work of recovering a style of discourse that makes real now, in concrete ways, the significance of the old message. This needs not just heroic work by a pastor, but “an entire community of . . . believers who trust its own way of speech.”28

      4. The Style of Bible Study Used in the Workshops

      My aim in the workshop is both to present the best scholarship I can and also to wish for readers to be open with the biblical text, and to want it to lodge and abide in themselves. (I distinctly remember in Sunday school, at the age of seven, thinking to myself that Daniel could not possibly have survived in a den of lions! What was important was that I was not shocked or fazed by the thought of alternatives.) It means that to take part in a Bible study is to accept that there will be “traditional” as well as “liberal” or radical views of event and meaning. Discourse over a passage will contain different points of view. Attitudes will be not only cerebral but heartfelt, and even unconscious. So the aim is both to maximize scholarship (as well as I am able) and also to want others to be nourished, “enfaithed.” Finding a way through the minefield of Johannine scholarship is as tricky as finding a way through the territory of the human personality! The academic is fascinating, and traditional methods of criticism valid and essential; whilst the personal is also fascinating, essential, and valid in its own way.

      Practically all the workshops have been worked through generally, and particularly in a group over about fifteen years in the Enfield, London Circuit of the Methodist Church. I am deeply indebted to them and to all the groups I have worked with, all faithful and adventurous. I take a leadership role, using a table or lectern to set out notes and books with quotations. This could be called a “tutorial” role. But with pleasure, and I hope some skill, I recognize that the group (of which I also am a member!) has a life, an energy, a cohesion, and a fellowship (koinonia) and will settle the text down into itself, the group, and find it full of significance.

So the method of study includes both a traditional one, a historically based discussion utilising knowledge of the text through the familiar criticisms, and also a recontextualization through meaning felt in group sharing, through social interaction. These “social means” (John Wesley’s term for sharing personal experience in caring groups) extend the traditional hermeneutic stances. Speech exchange patterns and the interaction of different “voices” in a group illustrate “subtle interpretative interaction” and suggest “a hermeneutic at work . . . that is not driven by a quest for knowledge, but rather by relational concerns; and by the hope that in their ‘fellowship’ and learning together they will discover insight.”29 The groups are indeed meant to do “Bible study,” but in the context of personal activity. They are what we call “experiential” or “empirical.” They look at a text and relate to it, to their inner world, to each other, and to the group process. They practice biblical interpretation in a faith community. “[A] social interactionist approach recontextualizes understanding of biblical interpretation.”30

In analyzing speech exchange patterns and the interaction of different voices in the group that connect a passage to personal experience, Todd notes that the leader with a tutorial style “projects the possibility of a particular kind of response,” but when he also “invites people to identify their own experience . . . the effect is striking.”31

Sharing personal material and story is facilitated by the questions asked. They have the effect of contextualizing the passage in our own experience. When the right questions are asked, people are set free to relate to the passage in themselves. The questions are the key. “In the question lies the answer.”32 They will reflect the mind of the facilitator, but will also open the doors of opportunity, opportunity for the members to speak their mind, to open their minds to the text and to each other. Asking the right question is signally important.

      Boxes are used as a simple device to separate sharing activity from the unfolding commentary. Inside the box are one or more questions designed carefully to encourage personal sharing. They are not intended for discussion, but for sharing, with the framework of experience suggested in the passage which is being studied acting as the holding background. Time must be given to this, for members of the group to enter in to the narrative, together with entering into themselves. Where more than one question is suggested, they should be taken one at a time for the fullest benefit, and used to journey step by step along the inward and the exterior road. The pertinence of the passage, experienced through the question, is for self-awareness and deeply personal sharing. Because we open the text, we are enabled to open ourselves.

      5. The Workshop Style: In Particular,

      the Nature of Sharing in Small Groups

      The advantage of a workshop style is that it provides the opportunity for a variety of distinct yet interrelated elements. A session can include straight teaching, discussion, personal reflection, sharing in pairs or small groups or in the whole group, debriefing together, and activities. There is flexibility and openness, separateness and togetherness, hard work and humor, giving and receiving, waiting and watching, and above all mutuality. Members of the group can be pressed to the utmost of their learning capacity. They can also press for slowing down and for explication. The more we know about the text, the world behind and within, the better. This is the context in which we can search the world, our world in front of the text. Yet we must move beyond the cerebral to the СКАЧАТЬ