More about Me

Neutral, objective biblical interpretation – the tradition ideal of exegesis – simply does not exist, and never has. All exegesis is also eisegesis – the interpreter is always personally involved in the act of interpretation – and the ethics of interpretation mandate that the interpreter own up to that involvement. My readings of texts always come from the specific realities of my situation and experience. Nevertheless,  I begin with some words from Roland Barthes, from the autobiographical pages that begin his book, Roland Barthes: "Once I produce, once I write, it is the Text itself which (fortunately) dispossesses me of my narrative continuity. The Text can recount nothing …" (4). I write this in the fear but also the hope that this text will replace me or stand in my place, speak for me but also speak instead of me, interrupt my story, separate me from that story.

I grew up when rock ‘n roll was young, and I graduated into the hippie counter culture. My father was a Chicago patent lawyer, and my mother was a lawyer’s wife, both of them Eisenhower Republicans. We lived in a lilly white, affluent suburb, but I also went to a large public high school with a diverse student body, and I was very much aware of the sprawling West Side ghettoes just a few miles to the east. My family was active in a Methodist Church where, probably because many of its members were well-educated professionals, and also because there is no significant theological tradition in American Methodism, we young folks were allowed to talk and think as we pleased. We questioned God, and the meaning of life, and even our suburban privilege.

This was during the post-Sputnik period, at the height of the cold war. I did honors study in math and science, and got so far ahead in course work that it only took me three years to finish college. But by the time I graduated from high school I was burned out on math and science. In college I majored in Philosophy, with minors in Sociology and Psychology and a growing interest in literature of all sorts. I read Marx, Sartre, and Nietzsche, Freud and Durkheim. I went on peace marches and civil rights marches. I rebelled against my bourgeois roots.

I went to seminary with thoughts of an academic career or maybe institutional chaplaincy. But I was becoming alienated from the church, which I saw aligned with the privilege of the white upper middle class. I looked, with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Albert Camus and the "death of God" thinkers among others, for a post-Christian church for the "secular city," or even a revolutionary religion. I got married, lived in a couple of different communes, got involved in street ministry in the inner city, and eventually helped shut down the Northwestern University campus during the great student strike of 1970. I entered a Ph.D. program with a major in theology and minors in New Testament and literary theory – the sort of thing that was then called "theology and literature." Since Northwestern did not have a program of this sort in place, I pretty much designed my own curriculum, with the help of a supportive committee, and I did a dissertation exploring comedic aspects of contemporary theology. I was already thinking of theological discourse as narrative, and as fiction.

It wasn’t until I was nearly done with my dissertation that I encountered semiotic structuralism and poststructuralism – both of them at the same time, so that it took me a while to sort out some of the relationships. I started reading Michel Foucault and Barthes, and then Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, and others. It was then that I also discovered some interesting things happening in biblical studies. I received my Ph.D. in 1974, the same year that Semeia was first published. I had studied at Garrett Seminary with William Doty, who was involved in the early Semeias and was himself one of Robert Funk’s students. But my seminary and graduate coursework in the Bible concerned older forms of historical criticism, with form criticism and the new hermeneutic presented as the latest thing. When I came across the early writings of scholars such as John Dominic Crossan and Dan Via, their views resonated strongly with my own interests – particularly Via’s book, Kerygma and Comedy in the New Testament. This eventually led me to revise my dissertation and publish it under the title, Theology as Comedy (1980). A revised version of this book is available here.

As a student, I had been disappointed by the highly speculative historical studies that passed as biblical scholarship, making assumptions and then drawing conclusions that coincided, it seemed, with the views of liberal Protestantism. Likewise, the New Criticism that was still fashionable in secular literary circles seemed hermeneutically deficient to me. I could not understand how meaning could be somehow contained "in" the text. It appeared that what both biblical historians and New Critics saw in the text was mostly themselves. The early structuralists also wanted to find meaning "in" the text, but as that method evolved and indeed mutated the answers became more and more sensitive to the problematic of meaning. Barthes’s now-famous essay on Genesis 32 showed me that meaning was something that the reader, in the present moment, negotiates with the text, not something hidden in the text at its point of origin.

Meanwhile, after several years of academic un(der)employment, I was offered a job at Adrian College. During this period, I had worked at various different jobs, including campus minister, bus driver, psychiatric orderly, part-time college teacher (of many different subjects but never biblical studies!) and finally, home care provider to my own small children. It was also during this period that I began writing for publication. The job at Adrian arose by chance, and I thought it might not last very long, but I recently retired from the college after teaching there for 30 years. During that time it was a small department, three full-time people, and a double department at that, both Philosophy and Religion. We had only a few majors and minors, and we were primarily a service department in a school that calls itself a "liberal arts college" but mostly trains people to become school teachers, businesspersons, and police officers.

In other words, I was not primarily trained in biblical studies, and until the last few years before I retired, I did not had biblical studies as my primary teaching responsibility. Nevertheless, my research and writing for the last 25 years have focused heavily on the relevance of poststructural literary theory and semiotics to the understanding of the Bible.

My book, The Limits of Story (1985), was provoked by a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar during which I studied intensively with the poststructuralist critic Paul de Man. This remarkable experience encouraged me to explore the metaphysical and linguistic underpinnings of narrative, especially in relation to biblical genres such as myth and parable. A version of this book is available here. In The Limits of Story, I examine the relation between literary genre and linguistic reference, and this then continued for me into a study of literary fantasy, a genre which has fascinated me ever since I was a child. I understand fantasy, following Tzvetan Todorov, Rosemary Jackson, and Jack Zipes, as a literature that unsettles the reader’s assumptions and beliefs and thus opens the possibility of new perceptions, new thoughts and new values. Fantasy is basically a revolutionary literature. In the fantastic narrative, the text’s reference to reality somehow becomes uncertain, and the fictionality of the text is thereby made explicit. Over the years I have published numerous articles on fantasy and the Bible, especially focusing on the gospel of Mark. In 2006 I revised these articles and wove them all together, along with some new bits, into a book, The Phantom Messiah.

A second NEH seminar, this one with the postmodernism expert Ihab Hassan, further refined my interests along these lines, for postmodernism is very much concerned with the problem of meaning. Shortly thereafter I was invited to become part of the "Literary Facets" unit of the Westar Institute, a group of people that rather quickly metamorphosed itself into the Bible and Culture Collective. Ten people of different genders, ages, religious orientations, and academic affiliations spent several years working closely together in order to write a book, The Postmodern Bible (1995), and to explore in brave new ways the brave new world of postmodern biblical scholarship. I am proud to have been part of that experiment, and I don’t think the full consequence of what we achieved has yet been realized. I cannot begin to estimate the value, for my own thinking and scholarship, of being so closely involved with these nine brilliant people, focusing on the same task over a considerable period of time.

In essays focusing primary on the gospel of Mark (that most uncertain of gospels), I have explored ways in which the fantastic operates within biblical narratives. I have also written about the fantastic in nonbiblical literature, television shows, and films. One goal of my editing and writing partnership with Tina Pippin has been to open up a wider dialog between biblical scholars and serious students of fantastic narratives, and this has resulted in four collections of essays involving dozens of contributors, Semeia 60 (1992), an issue of the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts (1997), and two books, The Monstrous and the Unspeakable (1997) and Violence, Utopia, and the Kingdom of God (1998).

I understand the fantastic as a point at which ancient and contemporary texts resonate with one another. They "translate" one another, in the sense that Benjamin speaks of the tangential point at which the original text and its translation touch one another. It is not a transfer of meaning but rather a point at which what Walter Benjamin called "pure language" becomes apparent.

Translation theory has been another major interest of mine. Following Benjamin, de Man, and Derrida, but also logicians such as John Stuart Mill, Gottlob Frege, and Willard van Orman Quine, I reject the notion of "dynamic equivalence" that is widely accepted in Bible translation societies and other Christian circles and only recently challenged in some SBL sessions. The task of translation serves as a topic (much like the fantastic) through which the text’s resistance to meaning becomes apparent. Through my studies in literary fantasy and in translation theory I have become more and more aware of the text as a physical object, an other that is not an "Other" in any theological sense (à la Paul Ricoeur or Emmanuel Levinas) but simply an inert physical thing that says nothing.

In recent writings, I have attempted to make the physicality of the text an important aspect of my readings of biblical and nonbiblical narratives and my understanding of semiotic theory. My goal has been to bring to light the silent, inert materiality of the text, to become aware of how that materiality lets the text speak, and how it also keeps the text from speaking. Since I can only do this through yet another text, the task inevitably defeats itself – as Barthes says, "the Text can recount nothing" – but this failure continues to instruct me.

Another theme that has emerged in my research and writings, and that was very much stimulated by my involvement with the BCC, is the question of ideology. In relation to texts, ideology takes the form of intertextuality. Intertextuality is the meaning that arises when two or more texts are brought together – again, the task of translation. This returns me to the question of the physicality of the text, and of how texts come to be regarded as meaningful. How can texts acquire the meanings that seem obvious and natural and unquestionable to some people, even though these meanings are not at all obvious to others? I have played with a "reading from the outside," inspired in part by Isaiah 6:9-10 and Mark 4:11-12: "for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand." Reading from the outside counters a widespread belief that only those within the faith community can properly understand the scriptures. Reading from the outside is the "stupid" reading of those who are not privy to the institutionalized understanding passed down through catechisms and creeds, i.e., through ideology. As one who is himself estranged from the believing community, but still fascinated by the biblical texts, reading from the outside is both my only option as a biblical critic, and an intellectually provocative exercise.

All of these interests have played major roles in my books, Jesus Framed (1996), and Sign, Text, Scripture: Semiotics and the Bible (1997), and in nearly all of my more recent writings.

Although my formal ties to Christianity have largely withered away, I am still drawn to biblical texts and the semiotic and ideological questions that they stimulate in me. For me these texts serve as an irritant, a provocation, and a cause for wonder; I find them both beautiful and horrible. As I have drifted away from Christianity, I have become more and more aware of the church’s claim to ownership of these texts, and I have wanted to dispute that claim, to steal the texts and allow them to sink or float on their own in the cultural currents of our times, just like any other text.

I want to "liberate" these texts from the hermeneutical control of the Bible through a semiotic critique of the canon of the scriptures. In recent writings, I have pursued this topic at some length. My book, The Control of Biblical Meaning: Canon as Semiotic Mechanism (2001), describes the Bible as resulting from the ideological desire to secure the text against the threat of loss, to possess the text and to confine its meaning. The New Testament appropriates the Jewish scriptures and turns them into something else, namely, the Christian Old Testament. This happens at different levels of the biblical texts, from the macro level of a single codex binding together two Testaments into one unified object, to the micro level of numerous references to "the scriptures," "the law and the prophets," "what Moses says," as well as unmarked citations and allusions. It also happens within each of the biblical canons, in what Michael Fishbane calls inner-biblical exegesis. The entire collection of writings restricts the reading of any one of the texts. The canon appears because a religious community desires an intertextual web through which the scriptures completely explain each other. I do not think that my desire to break the canon is any less ideological, or theological. I still regard myself as a theologian, albeit a post-ecclesiastical theologian.

In recent writings and publishing projects, I have pursued further implications of the breakup of the canon in the contemporary world. In various articles I have explored what happens to the meaning of biblical texts when their reading is no longer controlled by the canon. I edited Culture, Entertainment, and the Bible (2000), a collection of writings by a variety of scholars which explores in various ways the appropriation of biblical texts in modern media. I also co-edited with Richard Walsh Screening Scripture (2002), another collection which focuses somewhat more narrowly on the appearance of biblical texts, themes, and images in recent popular movies, and Those Outside: Noncanonical Readings of Canonical Gospels (2005).

I want to study biblical texts because I still want to read them and to understand them. Furthermore, I cannot imagine seriously studying something without in some way wanting to share that study. On the other hand, a teacher who is not also a student is no teacher. I think of teaching, as I do of writing and editing, as a collective task, a collaboration. Most of the institutional trappings that distinguish teachers from students are ideological deceptions, like the curtain hiding the Wizard of Oz. The main thing that separates teachers from students is that the teachers have been around the pike a few more times, and they know a few more of the tricks and traps. But sometimes even that doesn’t count for much. I tell my students that I learn from them, even the youngest freshmen, and it is true. I expect my students to help me read and understand, and they do.

In my teaching as in my writing, my strategy is to make the texts that we read problematic – whether they are biblical or philosophical or contemporary literary works, to treat them not as answers but as questions or puzzles. I invite my readers and students to read as I do – that is, from the outside, stupidly. My desire is to get readers and students to look closely at the text and not assume that they already know what it means, or that someone else does. Not because the text is suddenly going to speak to them – I am no believer in "word events" or the kerygmatic encounter in the existential situation – but so that the reader will become uncomfortable with the text, so that she or he will perceive its otherness, its silence. My hope is that when these readers or students do then turn to some commentator who would explain the text’s obscurities – whether that commentator be a saint, a great scholar, a drunken roommate, or even me – they will not simply accept that explanation without question. Instead they will receive the commentary also "from outside," as a text that cannot explain itself, that itself also requires commentary.