#220 It's a Cold and It's a Broken Biblical Theology

The New York Times did a story today on Leonard Cohen's return to touring after 15 years away from the stage which included a "five-year stint in a Zen Buddhist monastery." Cohen is probably best known for having his song "Hallelujah" covered by Jeff Buckley and numerous others artists.

Poetry has always frustrated me because of it's often difficult to extract it's meaning and Cohen is a poet first and foremost, and a songwriter second. So the Times asked him straight up, and he responded as elusively as a poet would.

"About the meaning of those songs, Mr. Cohen is diffident and elusive. Many are, he acknowledges, 'muffled prayers,' but beyond that he is not eager to reveal much. 'It’s difficult to do the commentary on the prayer,' he said. 'I’m not a Talmudist, I’m more the little Jew who wrote the Bible,' a reference to a line in 'The Future,' a song he released in 1992. 'I feel it doesn’t serve the enterprise to really examine it from outside the moment.'

Here Cohen illustrates a concept that over the last five to seven years has revolutionized my personal view on what the Bible is and isn't. Though he writes the songs, he doesn't always understand their meaning. His phrase "muffled prayers" is reminiscent of Paul's recognition of human weakness affecting our ability to pray for what we ought to pray for. Therefore, Paul says, the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express (Romans 8:26).

But what hit me as powerful and important was his concept of the muffled pray-er vs. the comment-ator, the Talmudist vs. the "little Jew who wrote the Bible." Though we'd all say we know better, growing up in the church has caused us to become accustomed to thinking of the Scriptures as a sort of systematic theology text, a complete picture of all there is for man to know about God, and an internally consistent monograph guided by an invisible hand, as it were.

But what if the Bible is viewed rather simply as the accumulated reflections of a community who had direct interaction with the one true God? Without a doubt, a large portion of the Scriptures are a documentation of God's spoken words to this community. But what if instead of viewing the Bible primarily as God's word to us, we instead viewed it as the community's muffled prayer and response to him, and it's historical account of this interaction as a deposit for future generations and witness to the nations? Here the document itself is seen as a very human document, again, a muffled prayer. It is a desperate cry, a song, a old story told by parents and grandparents and finally put to papyrus, sage advice from a father, an existential crisis, a love story, a harsh rebuke, letters to fellow sojourners, and most importantly a witness to the Word of God personified, Jesus Christ. Together it is all of these things, but independently it is each of these things.

The implication here, of course, is a question that I've seen making the rounds on other blogs and is increasingly becoming the subject of scholarly book-length studies. The question is: To what extent can we construct a biblical theology considering the diversity of historical contexts, experiences, authors, and viewpoints contained therein? We often hear talk of Pauline theology, covenant theology, Old Testament theology, New Testament theology, and numerous others much smaller in scope. But how far can we go in contructing a grand theological system called "Biblical Theology?"

In an interview over at Ken Schenk's blog, Peter Enns defined biblical theology as "reading the Bible as a grand narrative of diverse and historically particularized episodes that achieves an eschatological coherence in Christ." For me, this raises the question of whether we should look at developing, at least in our own personal minds, an eschatological theology or studying the Bible's own apocalyptic theology, if that's even possible. But that's research for another day.

For now, it's a good start to simply ask: What if we began to see the writers of the Bible more as muffled pray-ers, than as comment-ators? More as little Jews than scholars of God. The comment-ator looks for grand meaning and application. The "little Jew" just utters muffled prayers.

To return to the Cohen article, you can see that it's hard to pin this guy down very easily on the religious map. One of the artists who has covered his songs says, “He has investigated a lot of deities and read all the sacred books, trying to understand in some way who wrote them as much as the subject matter itself. It’s for his own healing that he reaches for those places. If he has one great love, it is his search for God.” Wherever he stands, he can certainly put together some beautiful imagery. The article quotes one of his new songs as saying, "Tell me again when the filth of the butcher is washed in the blood of the lamb.” Depending on how you interpret that, the answer is either "at the cross," or it is the same question the souls under the altar in the book of Revelation keep asking God: "How long?" (Revelation 6:10)