The Bible as Literature or Literature as The Bible

The following is an abstract for a paper I’m working on. It’s at the heart of my covenantal literature project.

Literary scholars seeking to integrate faith and literature have faced a perpetual problem: an inability to agree on the how the Bible and literature are connected.  On the surface, the ubiquitous “Bible as Literature” course constitutes one solution. In practice, however, the course more frequently offers a more secularized Bible rather than a more faithful literature. This is because the definition of “literature” scholars bring to the course is either spiritually neutral or overtly secular. The irony is that literature’s definition is far from stable. In his landmark Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye wrote, “We have no real standards to distinguish a verbal structure that is literary from one that is not.” Postmodern literary theory magnified an existing dilemma. Little wonder, then, that integrating faith and literature is difficult. We can’t agree what it is we are supposed to integrate faith with.

In this paper, I argue that rather than defining literature first and bringing that definition to the Bible, we should take the highly symbolic and stylistically diverse writing in scripture as a more faithful and firm basis for a definition of literature. We need not cordon off literary with words like “fictive” or “make believe.” Rather, we see literature as a kind of writing that is not primarily discursive and analytical, but symbolic and artistic. This allows us to see Christ “a true myth,” according to C.S. Lewis, “a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

Here is where the integration of faith and literature begins.