Monday, January 31, 2022

Scripture is, first and foremost, an Art Form, not a “Rule Book”!

 


Citation: Armstrong, Karen. The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts. London: The Bodley Head, 2019.

 

(Here are some of my [jkk's] initial personal takeaways from watching some video clips of Karen Armstrong lecturing about the book and a quick browsing of the book itself. Hopefully, it will urge people to go and read the book itself. See below for links to some public lectures by Armstrong on youtube.)

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"The Bible" (and sacred scripture in general) is frequently thought at least in the West to be writings where one can find eternal, immutable, and foundational truths that people have to consult or should learn and put into practice in order to attain an ultimate goal which, in traditional Christianity, meant “being saved” or "getting to heaven." 

Karen Armstrong in her book The Lost Art of Scripture (2019) seeks to correct that common misunderstanding and set the record straight about what might be the true purpose of "scripture" in a spiritual tradition.

And what would that be? She insists that "scripture" is an "art form" (p. 7). Being an art form ... it is the product of and is concerned primarily with touching the right-brain human functionalities of intuition and artistic sense, rather than the left-brain characteristics of rationality and logic. Unfortunately, in the West, since the Enlightenment, scholarship has sort of imposed many left-brain functionalities upon the scriptures. That has in turn resulted in our missing and losing its original identity of being an art form.

The following are noteworthy points that I randomly picked up from listening to Armstrong's online lectures and browsing through the book. They contain some insights about some essential ways by which—Armstrong thinks—scripture functions.


Lesson #1: Scripture Invites Us to Enter Mystery

The notion <that scripture tells us what we must believe; that it gives us truths we must accept> is not really correct! (Library of Congress lecture: timestamp 13:00)  Instead, there is a deliberate vagueness about even some important matters throughout the Bible. That is an invitation for us to plunge deeper into mystery and not fool ourselves into thinking that we have received a quick and complete answer to our perplexing questions by consulting the book like a manual.

This deliberate vagueness that acts as an invitation to enter mystery is symbolized by the name of God in Hebrew:

אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה ... The word was possibly read as "Ehyeh asher Ehyeh" meaning "I am that I am." Another possible, perhaps better translation might be: I will be who I will be. That phrase is intentional in suggesting deliberate vagueness. For example, if someone asks you where some friends of yours went and you answer, “they went where they went,” you are basically saying, “I don't know where they went.” When God, therefore, tells Moses that his name is YHWH (with the above-mentioned vague meaning), that basically means that God doesn’t want to box the divine identity in some fixed category, hence, God will be who God wants to be. To be curt about it, God was in effect telling Moses and the people, “Mind your own business” “Don’t think that you know who I am or who I will be.”

Examples from other religious traditions: Way back in the 10th century BCE, in India, they developed a form of religious discourse known as the brahmodya competition (See: The Great Transformation, p. 127). It was a competition among priests about who could discourse on sacred mysteries best. It was carried out by having a series of profound reflections from different priests about the nature of the sacred. The priest who won the competition would be the one who reduced everyone to silence because everyone would be at a loss for words to express the sacred mystery. And in that silence—it was recognized—the Brahman (the ultimate reality) was present. 

Tao Te Ching of Confucianism declares: The Dao (the Way, the Ultimate Principle) that can be named is not the Dao'   

Hence, scripture does not really tell us what we have to believe. Rather, it opens us up to the reality that when we speak about God, we actually don't know what we're talking about. It's a limit concept - shows us our limitation!  cf. again the Brahmodya competition.


Lesson #2: Scripture is Primarily Forward-Looking

[Scripture (as a community’s spiritual-religious text) does not primarily expect us to go back to the original meaning of the text. This is the opposite of what modern scholarship does because scholars want to go as close as possible to the original texts and study them. But this scholarly project is a post-enlightenment quest. That’s not how many believers treated their scriptures in the beginning: they used scripture to engage life in the present so that the future could be better

If there’s one thing we can say about the nature of these ancient texts, it would be: It's actually impossible for us to go back perfectly in time. Scholarly efforts to reconstruct the past based on scripture will always be incomplete and imperfect. (As a scholar I would add though: scholarship is of course important to make us understand better what scripture meant in the past and how we can correctly apply it to the present!)

So, it is again clear that Scripture is an innovative art; it is creative; it insists that you move forward by applying scripture’s lessons to the present. The Jewish practice of midrash (creative interpretation of tradition to make it applicable to present realities) wonderfully illustrates this character of scripture.


Lesson #3: Scripture Invites Us to Transcend Ourselves

Scripture is not about me. Scripture is not meant to just tell us about our own private spirituality but must rather issue in practical action. Scripture tells us to act! It seeks to conquer EGO in concrete ways.

Illustrative here is the story of Buddha. After he attained enlightenment, he was resistant to the idea of teaching it to others because that would hold many challenges. In the end, however, he had to share and teach his enlightenment with the whole world in order to help people to find a solution to the problem of suffering.

This quality is also illustrated in the Confucian teaching of compassion that forms the heart of the Golden Rule = shu (in Japanese 思いやりomoiyari). This virtue urges us to discover what gives us pain, and resolve not to inflict that on others. Moreover, according to Confucius, this has to be practiced all day and every day. If done so, it will give the practitioner enlightenment. 

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There are various youtube videos of Karen Armstrong talking about the central points of the book and they're useful if one wants to gain a bird's eye view of the essential points of this voluminous work:

A talk she gave in Huston, TX on the book divided into three parts:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6xRv-g0GwY&t=1492s 

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKutgk1W-DY&list=WL&index=45&t=746s

Part 3 (Q&A): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsYYiF9DpR0&list=WL&index=46

Lecture at the Library of Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsG8DEszSbk&list=WL&index=3&t=1483s

Lecture at the Toronto Public Library: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF03oKfZxq8

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