on the walk

I am preparing to teach Romans this fall. So I am reading a handful of commentaries. There are exceptions but most commentaries of the academic sort begin with an introduction to the book. They usually will discuss any relevant issues related to authorship, textual transmission, dating, dominant interpretive traditions, historical situation, community of origin, etc. And most of them will at least make a passing reference to genre.

I love these genre studies. In fact I love all the intro stuff and think that all of it is vital to informed and honest Bible study. [Some of you have encountered my SAGA mnemonic, Setting Author, Genre, Audience.] But I must say that the genre issue has a place dear to my heart for at least two reasons.

First, the consequence of ignoring or misunderstanding the genre are serious. American readers are in general poorly educated to distinguish genre because we are so literarily unsophisticated. This makes us easy marks for advertisers, statisticians, journalists and politicians. We basically have two conscious categories; fiction and non-fiction (or even more crudely fact or fiction.) I have heard people remark, “It is a fact that X% of people do this.” Unfortunately Statistics are in general not facts. They are at best estimates and often they are deliberately designed to be persuasive.

When we approach the Bible with just the right mixture of genre naivety and pious submission, we of course assume that the Bible cannot be fiction and so it must be facts, or history, or doctrinal propositions or something like that. This genre error can cause major problems. It renders the poetry of scripture almost unusable and it severely weakens the power of much of the Biblical narrative. Will Willimon makes a similar point in an excellent article on preaching in the latest Leadership magazine. [I'd link to it but it is print only.] I won’t even get into the damage done to Genesis and Revelation because we don’t take the time to study genre, because I would rather get to my second point which is happy.

Genre study can open up a text like we never imagined. In my teaching (and maybe here) I plan to talk about Romans is an almost perfect example of a diatribe. This was an established literary form of its day and Paul uses it to great effect in Romans. There are many examples of scripture that positively unfold when we see how the text is interacting with many other texts like it. In the ancient world, many genre had strict structural guidelines and different sections of a text had different important functions. Consequently we can learn more about the authors intent when we see how the genre is used (and perhaps subverted) and how the genre is connected to the content. As time goes on I may comment on some specific examples of how knowing the genre and other literary conventions provides insight that is hidden to American readers.
For now I will leave with two examples about how genre functions.

Whenever I teach a NT letter, I always want to talk a bit about the letter form in the Roman Empire so that people can notice how the form is used and changed for Christian purposes. In these settings I have tried to show how even today we have some genres that have consistent structures: 5 paragraph theme. AP Wire report, etc.

My previous best example of this was a great old joke.

What happens when you play a country song backward?…

He gets his dog back, his truck back, his house back and his wife back.

I have a new best example. Check out this Youtube video of a group that has deconstructed the pop romance song and produced this excellent (and hilarious) peace of genre analysis. The song is called Title of the Song.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc1Js9P3urw[/youtube]

See you on the walk,

Ethan Magness

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