The Sons Of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do, Part 26

We saw in the last post that the artistic form of Scripture was vitally important to the communication of the message of the Bible, since the form itself influences the content, shaping content by the inherent emphasis of the type of form it embodies, and thus contributing to, and heightening, the overall context by virtue of highlighting strands of the information embedded in the message itself.  We saw that this contributed to a “symphonic” view of the Bible’s truth, necessitating reading Holy Writ not in isolated passages alone, but in light of all of Scripture together, with one part interpreting another (which images, in turn, the relationship within the Holy Trinity), so that we can arrive at a balanced assessment.  We saw that God’s vastness is best presented to us through a variety of forms; that, in Special Revelation (e.g., the Bible) God has revealed Himself under a variety of artistic forms, implying that the full range of artistic expression is valid for expressing God’s glory and message.

I have said in past weeks that the Bible is artistic in a literary sense.  But what does that mean?  To answer this, we must first determine the elements of artistry that define literature generally, before we can begin to see how the particular elements of various forms of literature present Scripture’s message.

Though there are different genres or categories of literature that comprise the biblical writings, all of these genres use larger proportions of particular types of language usage than everyday language does.  These types of language most obviously are constructed of figurative language, which include symbolism, allusion, metaphor, irony, simile, pun, word play, paradox, and a variety of connotative language usages.  Most of these language types occur most frequently in poetry, but they still appear throughout all of the other categories of literature which make up Holy Scripture.

It is also true that literary forms reflect, besides figurative language, rhetorical patterning, which is an arrangement of sentences or clauses that are the primary form of biblical poetry, as well as imaginary dialogues, repetition of questions or statements that use the same pattern, etc.

The way all these patterns are put together is what makes up the style of the writer of the particular literary text, which varies uniquely from author to author.  Writers use these patterns to multiply the meaning of the language and get more out of it than regular discourse does, which causes the reader to pay more attention to what is being written than they normally would, as the patterned usages catch and focus the attention of the reader, forcing a higher degree of concentration and, if it’s done well, appreciation and delight at the wedding of content and appropriate form.  Aesthetics are a part of the appreciation of good literature, beyond the content (even if the content is vital) of the work.

The Bible, the content of which is unarguably the most vital information a man will have in this life, has also enshrined its content in glorious artistic form, which carries, especially for those of us who are artists, its own content and meaning, which, Lord willing, we will examine in weeks to come.

The form of literature is shaped by the patterned language usages listed above, as well as balance, symmetry, variation, coherence, repetition, contrast, theme, and progression, all of which are utilized differently depending on the type of literary form being used (e.g., narrative, poetry, etc.).  Meaning is communicated through form, and literature’s techniques and forms are generally much more complex than regular communication.  To understand what a type of literature is saying, we must understand its form.

If we are going to understand a story, we need to figure out something about the background, the people or characters involved, and what they are doing (the events of the story).  If we are going to understand a poem, we need to figure out the images and the figures of language utilized by the poet before we can correctly assemble them to know what the poet is communicating in the poem.  This is also (and especially) true for understanding Scripture, which conservatively speaking, is at least eighty percent literary in form.

Thus, to even correctly understand God’s word, we all must become artists, or, at least, appreciators of Art, since so much of the Bible is Art!

The presence of so much artistry in Scripture means that, in contradiction to theories of gradual, accretive, impersonal evolution of the biblical writings (which the literary unity of the books militates against), or of theories of automatic-writing, divine dictation of the Word (which the varying literary styles from book to book contradicts), God prepared self-conscious human writers of the Holy Writ, a process in which God sovereignly used the personalities, literary styles, and individuality of His servants in the composition of His miraculously inspired and inerrant Word.

This is good news for artists, because it means that God deliberately used artists to communicate Truth about Himself, and we can gratefully know that Truth about the Lord can still be communicated legitimately (though not in the inerrant sense of the Bible) through our artistry.

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