Musings: Notes From My Daybook

It was in the early 1980's when my professor, Doug Brown, first introduced me to the idea. And it is quite stimulating to think about again--with a particular focus on Scripture.

The idea? The idea was to think about history in terms of reading a detective novel. Like Sherlock Holmes or Jack Ryan or Agatha Christie, a person who seeks to understand history, has to sift through the evidence and look for ways to put evidence together in a way that gives some sense to the data--and perhaps, more importantly, to the well-documented results. Doug told his historical theology classes that the best thing that we could do was to read Sherlock Holmes if we hoped to be good historians.

Such thinking frames a vitalized look at the way in which we read Scripture. In the past century a heavy and thorough-going critique of how the church has read Scripture has been offered by many in the academy. That critique has focused on the fragmentary nature of Scripture and has been particularly critical of the tendency of the church to read back into Scripture the Christ story.

But, if we consider the texts of Scripture as an unfolding narrative, full of clues and possibilities, then an alternative emerges. Perhaps, like a good detective novel, the Bible is presenting an ongoing story filled with characters, sub-plots, and multiple story lines. And, like a good novel, it really isn't until we get to the end of the story or near the end of the story until a critical movement in the plot occurs that suddenly sheds light on the whole story.

This way of thinking about the narrative of Scripture is presented by David Steinmetz in a wonderful article, "Uncovering a Second Narrative: Detective Fiction and the Construction of Historical Narrative (in The Art of Reading Scripture. Steinmetz makes it clear that it is the appropriate work of historians and Bible students to sift through the evidence through the lens of what has occurred. Historians (and detectives) can do no other.

Likewise, as Christians we should not be ashamed of acknowledging the various threads of God's work through creation, the formation of Israel, the prophets, and more as integral parts of the tapesty of God's kingdom. Nor should we shy away from a healthy christology that observe clues in texts that predate Jesus by hundreds of years. The gospel is the cosmic event that everything must now be seen through. As such the gospel becomes the interpretive key to understanding what Bible is up to.

Sherlock Holmes move over. "The game is a' foot."