Reading the Bible like it’s Science Fiction

I spend a lot of time thinking about how people read the Bible. It’s one of my favorite topics to write about. So, it is with some pleasure that I announce that I have found one of the big problems with modern Bible reading is that people do not read the Bible much like science fiction. I could mean an awful lot of things by that but I think it best to leave you confused for a minute. First, let me exonerate science fiction.

Growing up I loved to read science fiction. I also loved to have overly-intellectual conversations with people and so it didn’t take long for me to realize that for many people science fiction is barely writing. Now, if you’re a science fiction buff you know this already. If not try this: find a group of people who are discussing literature. When one of them finishes their discourse on their current reading, perhaps Melville (“the knot imagery in Moby Dick is truly evocative”), and asks what you are reading say, “Oh, I like a lot of science fiction.” Now, I’ll admit that there is some real crap out there going under the name of science fiction. However, there’s crap in a lot of genres and good science fiction makes you practice advanced language skills. That’s right, I am actually claiming that good science fiction makes you smarter.

Most fiction writing deals with familiar things perhaps placed in unfamiliar settings. Science fiction inherently deals with things that don’t currently exist, that are even less familiar in many ways than even the unfamiliar things you might run into in other fiction. Because of this, most science fiction has to find a way to tell you about an entire world (or worlds) of new things. World-building in science fiction is a serious task. In fact, one of the easiest ways to mess up science fiction is to ignore world-building. If you don’t pay careful attention to creating a world with rules that the reader is then taught, then you simply can’t build tension. Items that nobody understands all function as deus ex machina from a plot perspective. If you don’t explain the new things that you introduce, then your story becomes incomprehensible.

Back in high school I wrote short science fiction stories. They were short because I didn’t have the attention span to write longer ones and I won’t claim they were any good but one consistent challenge was describing the world in which I set my stories to the reader. Take, for instance, aliens. I wrote extensive notes on what my aliens looked like, ate, wore, how they spoke, what their social structures were, and so on. This was necessary to build them into realistic characters (although I probably lacked every other skill required to do this). Now, the reader needs to know some of this information. (The reader does not need to know a lot of it, although the author needs to know it so that the author can write a story with consistency because readers do notice that at least subliminally.) There are two ways to go about this. The first is to introduce a large block of text in which you simply tell the reader what you want them to know. You can sometimes get away with this under the right circumstances and most readers of science fiction are familiar with the dialog that exists solely so that an informed character can explain some important aspect of the fictional world an ignorant character and, really, to the reader. However, you can’t do this too often or it becomes terrible writing. Nobody really wants to read things like, “Tom took the alien’s hand in his and shook it. The alien was eight feet tall, had two arms, and was covered in blue fur.”

The second way to insert this information is to weave it into the text. I’ll return to my misspent youth for a moment and write you a short scene in which I attempt to do this for an alien:

Ambassador Ch’vmordath twisted a thin tentacle around the proffered choffee flower. His song-mouths crooned a soft tune of anticipation and delight. “Yes…..yes…” he whispered, pausing for the translator in his air filter to finish speaking. “I think we have a deal.”

I don’t claim to have done this well, but I’ve written three sentences each of which advances the plot of our hypothetical story. In the process you’ve learned that the alien Ambassador Ch’vmordath has tentacles, at least some of which are thin, that he has more than one mouth and one group of mouth sings his emotional state, that he likes choffee flowers (whatever those are), that he needs an automatic translator (which may be related to how awful his name is to pronounce – perhaps his species can’t make some of the sounds humans use), and that he may be unable to breathe the air in the room. If we knew that this was a room humans could live in without breathing apparatus then we would suspect that Ch’vmordath couldn’t breathe a normal Earth atmosphere safely. However, none of this information was just handed to us. Take this version:

Ambassador Ch’vmordath took the proffered choffee flower. Ch’vmordath’s species has tentacles, which is how he grasped the flower. The anticipation filled him with delight. You can tell because his species has several mouths called “song-mouths” that sing in various tones to indicate emotional states. “Yes….yes,” he whispered through the air filter his species needs to breathe, which also has a translator because it is almost impossible for them to replicate human speech sounds. “I think we have a deal.”

It’s awful. It’s also a lot easier to get information from this version. When you read the first one you have to read the sentence and understand what is happening by using your information about the characters, but also take what is happening and use that to know more about the characters. It’s a reading loop of sorts. In fact, I didn’t even bother to tell you what a choffee flower was in any of that. Perhaps chapters later I’d reveal that it’s a powerful narcotic to Ambassador Ch’vmordath’s species and you (being a good reader) would update your mental file on choffee flowers from, “Thing Ambassador Ch’vmordath likes, got him to accept the deal,” to, “Drug Ambassador Ch’vmordath is either using or selling, probably using because he sure liked it a lot, got him to accept the deal.” However, if you’d dropped the mental file because you don’t know what a choffee flower is you’d miss a big reveal in the story. Science fiction requires you to use half-formed concepts to comprehend sentences and then use your comprehension of the sentences to form the concepts more fully.

This sort of thing doesn’t end with the bizarre, like an alien species which you’ve never heard of. Science fiction is full of concepts that get re-used in slightly different forms again and again. Sentences like, “He was cut off by the whining pop of a laser discharge,” or, “The blue corona of hyperspace enveloped the ship,” are commonplace because even though laser weapons and hyperspace are old standards of a certain breed of science fiction, no two authors agree on the way they look, sound, or work. So even when the reader of science fiction runs across a familiar word (“Ah, ‘spaceship’, I recognize that term!”) they must be prepared to change what they think the term means based on what it does in the text.

And, suddenly, without warning, we’re back to the Bible. Many people read the Bible like it’s set in their country right around their current time in history. They read long Pauline discourses like Paul was speaking in modern English vernacular, or rather modern English Christianese since he uses words like “righteousness” and “salvation”. They read stories in the Old Testament like everyone has read the New Testament and was in church last Sunday to hear the pastor’s take on it. But the Bible takes place in an alien world. The Bible uses words we don’t automatically understand. In some sense the Bible is infinitely more alien than science fiction because God is not a human and if we believe that God has inspired the Bible then there are non-human ideas in there.

We could learn from reading science fiction. If we read the Bible in the manner I’ve described for science fiction then we could read the Bible better. If we read a passage where something is described as “faith” even when we don’t think it is then we could update our idea of what “faith” means in the Bible. If, instead, we hold on to our current idea we’ll get nowhere. If you’ve decided that all spaceships are the space shuttle Stars Wars is going to be pretty confusing. If you’ve settled on a strange idea of what God is then the Bible will be pretty weird, too. (This brings us back to Christianese, which frequently offers relatively poor definitions for common Biblical words.)

In fact, if we read like this we could uncover the riches of the individual books. Does John use “light” in a funny way? Heck yes he does. Does Matthew invoke Israel imagery in a different way than the other gospels? Yes. But we can’t recognize any of this unless our definitions of words, the concepts that stand behind the marks on the page, can flex to meet the different usages of each author.

Without the mental flexibility to redefine words as we read, the alien concepts of the Bible will pass us by. And, unfortunately, it is the alien concepts (including the alien concepts we think we understand) and not the ones we already understand quite well that we need most.