As a literature professor, I encounter many students who are literate but not literary. They can read fluently for information, but they are blind to the ways stories engross, delight, challenge, play with, undermine, and enlighten readers. And they are unaware of the role they—the readers—play in this process of creating meaning from stories, both as individuals and as communities. Being literate but not literary is a problem that plagues readers of the Bible, too.

Recently I gave a guest lecture to about 400 theology students in one of George Fox’s Cornerstone Courses: THEO 101 about reading the Bible as Literature. Clearly the Bible is literature: it is a culturally formative and valued collection of narratives, an early novella, legal documents, poetry, prophetic dream-visions, biographies, histories, and letters. Yet we frequently read the Bible as if it is simply a bald (and even boring) account of things simply as they happened. Or worse, we read as if we already know everything about these literary texts and have answered all the questions they raise. Too often Bible reading becomes an exercise in reaffirming what we already know. We are literate, but we are not literary in our reading of scripture. 

In this THEO 101 lecture, I demonstrate how we might read the Bible as literature by revisiting one of the most terrifying and poignant stories in the Bible: the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22).

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grace & peace,

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