"Living the Story" - My Hermeneutical Model

When I read a novel, I want to come away changed. That’s my hope. If it is a worthwhile story, and if I’ve “lived the story” as I’ve been reading it, then it impacts me. In “living the story” I am placing myself in a position to embrace the impact of the story.

“Living the Story” is what I call my hermeneutical model for Bible reading. It consists of 3 steps which closely parallel the steps of Jeannine Brown’s model in chapter 2 of her wonderful book Scripture as Communication. If you check it out, you’ll see that I’m following Brown closely, but saying the whole thing in my own—rather simple— way. (This is definitely an exercise in the classic study guide question: “Restate Brown’s hermeneutical model in your own words”).

1. First, I “enter the story world” of the particular Bible passage. When I call it the “story world” I’m not implying that it’s fiction. Believing in the supernatural goes hand in hand with believing in the God of the Bible, so I read the stories as real historical events. So I’m cool with Jonah and the fish, Balaam and his talking donkey, an ancient global flood, etc. But calling it the “story world” reminds me that there is a narrator telling me the story. And anytime you are hearing a story, you need to decide if you are willing to place yourself in the storyteller’s hands and risk being “changed” by his story. When I read the Bible, I’m going for it: I’m watching eagerly to see how this story will impact me. And what I really want to find is how the narrator himself wants me to be impacted. (The narrator, after all, is simply a convenient and useful term for the “voice” of the inspired author).

2. Second, because I have travelled to this (“long ago and far away”) story world, I know I’m going to need a “tour guide” to explain the foreign stuff. So it’s here in step 2 that I am seeking to navigate the gap between the “culture of the story world” and the “culture of Jim’s little prairie-dwelling, American-in-Saskatchewan life.” Every hermeneutical model has to deal with this gap, knowing that Old Testament instructions such as: “don’t plant 2 kinds of seed in one garden plot,” “don’t eat swine,” and “when you enter the land, kill all the Canaanites” had meaning and significance for Old Testament Israel. But what do they “mean to us today?” Well, the quest for meaning in these foreign passages has to start with figuring out what it meant to the first hearers of the story – the “original audience.” So we study their historical, cultural, and theological context, seeking to understand the impact that the narrator intended for his first listeners.

3. Finally, I seek to receive (embrace) that same “impact” in my own life. In whatever way the particular text was trying to impact the lives of those original hearers, I want to yield to that very same impact. I’m deliberately talking about the “impact” of a particular passage (when you may have expected “meaning”). But I’m committed to finding—and indeed expecting to find—the “appropriate impact” in the “intended meaning” of the text. But I really like the focus on “impact,” because I don’t think that God ever wants us to be done when we have “found the right meaning.” We are always to let that meaning—that message—change us. Also, if my reading mindset is merely a “quest is for the text’s meaning,” I am likely to settle for grabbing of a “universal principle” for “applying to my life” in some hypothetical future situation. Rather than gleaning principles for future use, I prefer the mindset of “looking for a text’s impact.” Because that’s what reading good stories is all about: in the very reading of the story, I am changed. And that is exactly what I want from God’s stories. When I read one of his stores, I want to come away changed.