In my last post, we saw that Scripture’s content is communicated through a variety of literary forms (narratives, parables, poetry, law, epistles, etc.), each of which utilize patterned language in the way appropriate to its form to heighten the expressiveness of what is being said, to catch the attention of the reader, and simply to beautify the content.  We saw further that, in order to catch the full intent of what is being communicated in the Bible, every reader of it must himself become an artist, learning the way the art of the form used works, so that he can understand all of the nuanced meaning carried by both form and content.  The implications of this wedding of form and content in Scripture have tremendous implications for Christian artists, who are called, as the inspired writers of Holy Writ were, to communicate content through form and thus effectively share the meaning of what is being communicated across the full spectrum of their audience’s understanding.

In order to begin to appreciate how to understand the relationship of these various forms to their content (and how the forms themselves, as forms, constitute content), we will begin in this post to look at some of the aspects of the literary form which constitutes the greater part of the Bible, that of narrative, which comprises both history and stories in Scripture.

The characteristics, or elements, of Biblical narrative are primarily plot, character, and setting.  The setting, of course is the place (or places) where the story’s action occurs, but it involves more than just the locale.  Setting takes in the socio-cultural background of a story (e.g., how a royal Egyptian household would be ordered in the time of Ramesses, or a wedding’s customs in Cana of Galilee in the closing years of the first century before Christ), as well as naturally changing factors (such as the weather on the Sea of Galilee, or the abundance of food or lack thereof in the ancient Middle East, or the presence of invading or occupying foreign troops). These factors of the setting are frequently the critical elements around which the plot whirls.

The characters are the persons who act within the story, and this aspect of narrative sets forth not just who the characters are, but how they will respond in a situation, their abilities (an important component, especially if the character is not human or is supernaturally energized, such as angels are, or Samson in his strength was, etc.), and their relationships with other characters and their environment, as well.

The plot of narratives is essentially what happens, the actions and experiences of the characters in the setting of the story.  The shape of Biblical narrative has deeply impressed itself on, and has essentially formed, Western ideas of what a story should be—how it should be introduced, flow, and resolve itself (its beginning, middle, and end).  Whether the inspired histories of Scripture end in tragedy (like the story of Jephthah or of Cain and Abel), comedy (like the tale of Balaam and his ass), or epic heroics (like the accounts of David and Goliath, or Gideon and his three hundred), the pattern of the tales in the Bible introduce their characters in a setting in which a tension, or problem, arises which is dealt with to lead to a resolution (sometimes satisfying, sometimes disturbing, sometimes comforting, depending on which subtype of narrative, e.g., tragedy, comedy, epic, etc., is being employed; which depends upon the desired end the writers intend their audience to experience).

The widespread influence of this concept of narrative (especially the plot aspect) in the Western world can be attributed primarily to the ubiquitous influence of the Bible in the West, especially the King James Version (see Alister McGrath’s excellent book, In the Beginning, on this subject).  The accounts in Scripture, with their attendant approaches to narrative art, have impacted and given birth to Western narrative art forms, as Christian artists (who dominated the Arts in the West until recently) and their cultural heirs (Christian and non-Christian) imported the Scriptural approach to narrative into their own approaches.  The foundational ideas of our early epic poems (like Beowulf, or the Song of Roland) and ballads, which gave rise to more developed poems (The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales) and stories (Boccaccio’s Decameron), plays (Shakespeare), novels (Moby Dick), graphic novels, and movies in the West all bear the deep imprint of biblical ideas of narrative.  This can easily be contrasted with Eastern ideas, where, for instance, either no resolution takes place in the plot, the character development is extremely shallow, and the story will end most abruptly (as in the Tale of the Three Kingdoms, the Tale of Genji, or virtually any oriental “karate” film).

This concept of plot outline (beginning, then tension, followed by resolution) has even affected the Arts beyond literature, as successive-panel triptychs in painting, narrative friezes (like the Bayeux Tapestry), dance (“Swan Lake”), music (classical pieces, folk ballads, opera, etc.) and even worship (the historic liturgies of the Church), all of which display the pattern found in the Biblical plot outline approach.

It’s obvious, even in a cursory look like this one, how much of the Arts in the West have been impacted by the narrative form ensconced in Holy Writ.  Modernists’ attempts to circumvent or alter that form (especially under existentialist, absurdist, or Eastern models), while from time to time injecting novelty into the process, ultimately are doomed to eventual obscurity, since mankind, especially Western man, who has been trained to consider the Biblical approach to plot the normal one, is created in the image of God, and hence have an inborn sense of appreciation for the kind of event progression displayed in Biblical plot forms, especially since history itself is a narrative designed by God, and in which we are the characters, and God’s Creation is the setting.  This is why Western narrative art-forms tend to displace or effect change in Eastern ones when they interact (this is not because Western forms of art are naturally superior to Eastern ones, but is rather because the Western forms have been subjected to the cleansing and reorienting influence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  This also does not mean that Eastern art-forms are devoid of beauty or artistic worth, since all men, East and West, equally bear God’s Image.  It simply means that the Far Eastern art-forms have not yet been cleansed by the power of the gospel.  I don’t believe that humanity will be capable of offering its full offering of cultural praise and beauty until the Eastern peoples, with their unique cultural emphases and insights, enter into the communion of the Christ who restores all things to their originally intended purposes).

The lay out of the Biblical narrative plot form is directly related to the historicity of the stories recorded in Scripture.  The next post will (God willing) address that issue.