A Conversation with Phyllis Tickle

I really love Phyllis Tickle. The idea of looking more closely at the words of Jesus apart from the narrative aspect is helpful. Leo Tolstoy did that in a book called “The Gospel in Brief”.

Phyllis said the process helped her look at the gospels as Torah. Lately, I’ve been discovering the Jewish tradition of Torah commentary called Midrash. In Midrash, the ancient rabbis used creative stories to draw out the meanings in Torah. I think that is exactly what we have in the Gospels. I think the sayings of Jesus are like Torah, but the later developed Gospels about Jesus are more like Midrash. That understanding really helped me connect the dots.

I’m blogging more about Midrash and Emergent theology here:

http://www.faithprogression.com/search/label/Midrash

I guess it all depends on whether or not you see the Bible as a historical text or something more. If it’s just a historical artifact, it totally makes sense that it really is just poetry (as opposed to a poetized account of an actual Jesus who was actually G-d –which is, it seems, not generally a popular view within the Emergent movement).

I think Tickle’s new book opens up a radical subjectivity in interpretation, and almost has to see the Bible as somewhat mythological to warrant a departure from context. If the context of the Gospel narrative was intentionally included by G-d in the Bible we would be stuck with wrestling with it, but if the context really is just human fable (2 Peter 1:16) then we are free to invent new and more flattering/palatable fables concerning the narrative within which we interpret Jesus (contemporary application of Midrash?) –though I’m not sure that’s what Tickle is presenting to us seeing as how she seems to be asking us to read Jesus’ words in some sort a void free of contextual thinking (is that actually possible?).