The first part of the presentation was on the nature of the Bible (whether the Tanakh or the Christan Bible), because she points out that how we think about Biblical authority is derivative from how we understand what the Bible is, how it came to be, and how we understand revelation.

Classic assertion about revelation and the Bible:

The One who is beyond all names has engaged us in our history, in our time, and in our space.

The Bible is the record of God's foundational disclosure of God's own nature to Israel and to the Church. It is a privileged record of the experiences that our forebears had with God: the experiences that formed our community.

She then spent some time talking about language, because we can only communicate experiences to each other by means of language. She distinguished between ordinary language, scientific language, and poetic or metaphorical language.

Ordinary language: when I ask the bus driver for directions to the Inner Harbor (a Baltimore attraction), he does not pause thoughtfully and explore the various meanings of "Inner".

Scientific language: The goal of scientific language is to eliminate the possibility of misunderstanding. Its focus is precision, definition; it strives to eliminate ambiguity and subjectivity; it is descriptive.

Poetic/metaphoric: is the flip side of scientific language. Its goal is to build ambiguity, to disorient you from how you see the world so as to re-orient you to see it a different way, to redescribe reality and draw you into conversation. It is therefore not descriptive, but evocative and disclosive.

She then discussed the importance of paying attention to the genre of the texts in the Bible, with the classic example of how we all do this without even thinking about it when we read a newspaper.

She talked about referents. When you say the leg of a table, or the leg of a person, there's something you can point to: that's what you mean by "leg". But when you talk about love, or forgiveness, or reconciliation, what kind of referent can you have? You have to tell a story. The point of the story becomes the referent for the thing you are trying to explain.
  This has implications for how hung up we should get on the details of a story: if the reason to tell the story was to provide a referent for the idea the story is about, then focusing on the details of the story is missing the point. (Does it really matter whether Jesus' feet got wet when he walked on water? No, what matters is that I can trust in God in those moments when I feel like I'm drowning.)

Primary religious language is a subset of poetic/metaphoric language. Primary religious language is narrative: it tells stories to disclose an experience of the mystery of God in our time and place. (Other forms of religious language -- creedal, confessional, theological -- are scientific.)

There's not a lot of talk about revelation in the Bible; it's a sort of code word for trying to understand the authority of the Bible. God doesn't reveal a theology of revelation: God reveals Godself.

She then talked quite a bit about experiences we've all had in which we sensed something more was going on than just what was visible to our eyes: whether in the presence of a birth, or a death, or a wedding. She suggests that these are glimpses of a reality that's right here all along, but one that we do not ordinarily see; that these are, in a small way, pointers to God. I think she did this mainly to give us a referent for the ideas that came next.

Revelation, she proposes, is not an idea, but an event. It is an event in which God disclosed Godself to specific people at a specific place and time; an event that is charged with meaning and implication; an event that the people who experienced probably didn't understand fully at the time. (Because that's our common experience, right? When something profound happens, it often takes days, months, even years, for us to sort through exactly what it was and what it meant to us.)

These events profoundly affected the people to whom they happened, and it formed them into a community, created by and defined by having shared in that event.

The community then becomes the bearer of revelation. The event is over; there's only the people left who experienced something, and refuse to let it die. By remembering and retelling the stories, you "ensure that the event will have consequences".

The process of forming the canon is the community deciding which stories are most faithful to the event that formed them, and which are not. Thus, the infancy gospels with stories about Jesus as a little boy taking dirt, and forming it into a bird, and blowing on it, and having it fly away -- those were rejected because they had nothing to do with what the community understood as the point of the experience they'd had with Jesus.

The text, then, becomes the mechanism by which I find my way back to the event, and am formed by it. The way to the holy is mediated through the text, which is then mediated in my life.

So what makes the text sacred? The community holds the text as significant to people's formation. The story within the text becomes the master story, the master narrative that affects how people see and imagine the world. Its authority resides in the record of how my people lived with God.

It is authoritative because:
 - God was the author of the event
 - I trust those people: that they were trying to do what I'm trying to do: figure out how to live a faithful observant life.

Although the point of the talk was "how do we understand the authority of the Bible if we don't take it literally", she is not opposed to a literal reading and doesn't insist that none of it is literal. I asked her afterwards whether the model she had outlined for us could accommodate a literal reading of the text, and she said her first question would have to be, If you're going to take some parts of it literally, how do you decide which parts? I said "Literary genre, right?" and she said that's not enough, because even the "historical" books are in the bible as stories (evocative and disclosive), not as history (descriptive and precise).

I thought the topic and the starting point would be of interest to folks here on the Street, so figured I'd share. Next week we get to hear Rabbi Zaiman talk about midrash - I can't wait!