Article 4/4. The first three articles in this series made the case about the use of literary forms in the Scriptures to read, pray, and study. The Church teaches that God speaks through human writers, so readers find God’s meaning by paying attention to how those writers wrote. The stories and poems of the Bible carry meaning through their forms. The fear that this kind of reading leads to doubt is understandable, but the Church’s own guidelines answer it. This final article turns that case into a practice that any Catholic can use with a Bible, a pen, and some quiet.
Five Questions
This is a practice, not a technique. It is a deliberate intellectual activity that rewards the reader with deep attentive and deeper results. This practice involves the repeated asking five questions to whatever text one is reading. Before asking what it means for his own life, the reader brings these questions to the text first. These answers are prior to application and they assist interpretation by being sharper at observation. They do not replace prayer or the Church’s teaching. They ensure the reader heards from the sacred author before applying it.
1. What kind of writing is this?
The Bible contains stories, laws, songs, prophecies, proverbs, parables, letters, and visions. Each one works differently. A proverb states what is usually true about life, so “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov 22:6) is wise advice and not a guarantee. (I once heard a talk by a pastor who insisted that, since this was the Word of God, infallible and inerrant, that the parent will always produce holy and good children if they follow this. Apparently he did not realize that the kid gets a vote. This is an example of not discerning the literary form correctly.)
A parable makes its point through a made-up story. A letter answers the real problems of a real, local church and is not a narrative or a vision. Naming the kind of writing is the first step toward hearing it as it was written.
2. Who is speaking, and to whom?
Remember, in the biblical texts the narrative, speaker, or perspective can change within a single verse. Many psalms move from a complaint addressed to God, to words aimed at an enemy, to an answer spoken by the whole congregation. The original culture understood such shifts, whereas modern readers get lost quickly in its lack of linear storytelling. In the prophets, God sometimes speaks in the first person and the prophet sometimes speaks about God. A reader who keeps track of the voices will avoid confusing a complaint with a teaching, or a quotation of an enemy with the writer’s own view.
Common misunderstandings and ill interpretations come when skeptics are hunting in poor faith for cherry-picked examples of immorality endorsed by the God of the Bible. They will find plenty, because they do not understand how the genre was written. For instance, the story of the binding of Isaac is often retold as a megalomaniac God who demands glorification even at the expense of His followers own children. Instead, the story has long been interpreted by the Rabbis and others as the narrative form of condemning of human sacrifice practiced roundabout by Israel’s neighbors at the time. Modern readers miss this because our world has been shaped by this biblical inheritance of viewing human sacrifice as peak barbarism.
3. What patterns would the first hearers have recognized?
This is where the literary forms from the second article come in. The original audience knew that a lament usually moves from complaint to trust, so they would have felt the shock when Psalm 88 ends in stark darkness. They knew that a man tucked his long robe into his belt before he worked or ran, so figures of speech followed well-known actions. Good study Bibles and commentaries can help modern readers recover what the first hearers knew without being told. As Dr. Michael Heiser said repeatedly, “The Bible was written for you, but it was not written to you.” The reader requires assistance from various fields of scholarship to identify those culture elements a modern person would completely miss.
4. What is the writer trying to do?
Writers use words for many different things. Words report, teach, command, promise, lament, and praise. A report asks to be believed, a command to be obeyed, and a lament to be prayed. When Jesus says that anyone who does not “hate his own father and mother” cannot be his disciple (Luke 14:26), he is not commanding hatred, because Scripture also commands honor for parents. Matthew’s version of the same story sheds light on the point of the use of the literary form of hyperbole in teaching: “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt 10:37). The exaggeration makes a command unforgettable, which is to put Christ first.
5. How does this passage fit within the whole Bible and the Church’s reading of it?
The reader needs to remember that no passage stands alone nor should be read in isolation from the rest of the chapter, section, book, Testament, or whole biblical canon. The Church reads each part in light of the whole, together in light of her living Tradition, and in harmony with the rest of the faith (Dei Verbum 12), which includes faithful scholarship. This fifth question will help to the first four connected to the life of the Church and her orthodoxy. It also opens the text to the fuller meanings (the spiritual senses builts on the literal sense) that the Church has found in it, such as the way the Old Testament points ahead to Christ.
These are not new questions, nor are they particularly revelatory. Most readers ask some of these or all of them already. Scholars who study language ask similar ones; for instance, Stanley Porter describes three features of any piece of writing, its “field (what?), tenor (who?), and mode (how?)” (Porter, “Linguistics,” 310–311). The five questions adapt and increase one’s careful attention for Catholic readers.
Two Habits that Help
The following two habits make the five questions easier to answer.
The first is reading aloud.
The books of the Bible were written to be heard. Biblical poems “were written to be read aloud, vocalized, and thus heard” (Dobbs-Allsopp, On Biblical Poetry, 319). Many of the forms described in this four-part series, such as the paired lines of a psalm or the repeated word used as a frame for a story, are easier to notice with the ear than with the eye. Reading a psalm aloud will often help one hear the turn from complaint to trust before he could otherwise see it on a printed page or explain it.
The second habit is comparing translations.
Henry Schogt notes that translations of the same text “can be very dissimilar, thus drawing attention to the fact that many literary texts allow for more than one interpretation” (Schogt, Linguistics, Literary Analysis, and Literary Translation, 123). If a reader does not know Hebrew or Greek, he can still learn by comparing translations where a particular thought is difficult to put into English. When two good translations conflict, the difference usually marks a place where the words or idiomatic expressions in the original tongue or culture is hard to render well. The notes in a Catholic study Bible will often explain why. In fact, no Catholic study Bible is allowed to be published that does not contain such notes of explanation.
Return to Prayer
Biblical reading and studying in the way these four articles have discussed have just one goal, which is prayer. The Second Vatican Council taught that prayer should go along with the reading of Scripture “so that God and man may talk together” (Dei Verbum 25). Literary form serves that conversation, and the psalms are the perfect example.
The psalms of lament were intentionally written in general terms by the sacred authors. They almost never name a specific enemy or a specific trouble, so later believers could place their own life and struggle into the psalms. Dobbs-Allsopp quotes the scholar Patrick Miller, who said that the enemies in these psalms “are in fact whoever the enemies are for the singers of the psalms” (Dobbs-Allsopp, 196). King Hezekiah and Hannah both pray songs of thanksgiving that fit the pattern of the psalms (1 Sam 2:1–10; Isa 38:10–20). Elaine James remarks that when readers take up a poem written in the first person, “their own ‘I’ becomes the voice of the poem” (James, Invitation to Biblical Poetry, 25).
This is how the psalms were crafted by the sacred authors and it is how the Church has prayed them in the Liturgy of the Hours. A reader who knows that a psalm is a lament, that its harshest words belong to people speaking the language of great suffering, and that its “I” is open to anyone who prays it, can pray it with consideration and understanding, instead of disgust or embarrassment.
The Five Questions Applied to Luke 12:35–40
The first article in this series began with a verse from the Gospel of Saint Luke, which says: “Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the marriage feast” (Luke 12:35–36). It ends with a warning: “You also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an unexpected hour” (12:40). Let us now apply the five questions to it.
What kind of writing is this? It is a saying of Jesus that evolves into a quick parable about servants waiting for their master’s return.
Who is speaking, and to whom? Jesus is speaking to his disciples. The parable is meant for people who know him and already follow him.
What patterns would the first hearers have recognized? They knew that a servant tucked up his long robe before he worked and kept a lamp burning when he expected someone at night. They also knew that a marriage celebration ran late, so a master’s return might come at any hour. Then Jesus adds a surprise that no ancient hearer would expect. When the master finds his servants awake, “he will gird himself and have them sit at table, and he will come and serve them” (12:37). In the real world of Jesus’ day, masters did not serve their servants. This shocking twist reveals the kind of Lord Jesus is.
What is the writer trying to do? The text does two things: it gives a command and a promise. It commands readiness, and it promises a reward far beyond what any servant could hope for from his master.
How does this passage fit within the whole Bible and the Church’s reading of it? It belongs to the Bible’s broader teaching about watching for the Lord’s coming, which runs from the Old Testament prophets through the parables of Jesus and all the way to the closing prayer of the Book of Revelation, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20). At the Last Supper, Jesus himself served his disciples by washing their feet (John 13:4–5), and the Church reads the promise of the master who serves, commanding us to do the same.
A careful reader asks these five questions. He will find the literal sense of the text. He has a greater chance of knowing what is asserted by the sacred author. Now he can pray that Scripture passage as a word spoken to him. He can ask for the grace to be ready and marvel in gratitude that the Lord promises to serve those who wait for him.
Conclusion
God chose to speak through human writers who in all manner of ways: they wrote stories, songs, prophecies, laws, fables, and letters in the forms of their own times to their own audiences that shared a common language and culture. The literal sense of Scripture is what those writers meant through those literary forms and thus requires the reader’s careful attention. What they assert, God asserts, and the prayers they wrote, God has given the Church to pray. A Catholic who learns these forms is listening to the Word in the way God chose to speak it to us.