The Need for an Aesthetic Hermeneutic
“And whenever the harmful spirit from God was upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand. So Saul was refreshed and was well, and the harmful spirit departed from him.” 1 Samuel 16:23
I started playing piano at age six; learning the fundamentals of scales and intervals, key signatures and time signatures. By the age of nine I began playing the upright bass; age 12, the guitar; and age 14 the drums. Drawn to songwriting and fiction, I have journals filled with songs and song ideas, short stories and poems.
I think that’s what initially connected me to David and the Psalms; an understanding that linked me to him and his work. When I read the Psalms, I found they were written in a way that entered into artistic tension. They weren’t black & white. They were colorful and as such were intended to be read as colors on a master painter’s canvas. The Psalms should be heard as a skillful composer’s harmony and dissonance and interpreted through the lens of a poet’s integrated reality—the reality that knowledge can be and should be not only known but felt.
Growing up, music taught me to understand emotions as more than just fickle things that can’t be trusted. It taught me to embrace the tension of seemingly conflicting metaphors; to understand that fiction, simile, and hyperbole are not the same thing as lying or misinformation.
An Example
Whether it’s wiring or training or both, the Bible has always read differently for me. Challenges many have with certain Scriptures I immediately recognize as literary device, aesthetic deconstruction, or dramatic dissonance that will be resolved eventually.
I’ll give you an example. David, in a moment of agony, begins Psalm 22 with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus, in the midst of his agony, quotes David.
Without a poetic lens, this phrase has led to doctrinal discussions about God the Father abandoning his Son in the moment of his agony. I’ve heard it preached over and over again that the deeper death Christ experienced was separation from the Father, all from Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 22.
But that’s not what David was saying, nor was it what Jesus was saying, and an aesthetic lens makes it easier to see this. The Trinity is inseparable, and to think that God, the Perfect Father, would abandon his Son in the moment of his deepest pain and suffering is ridiculous. He can’t and He wouldn’t.
We know that David doesn’t actually think God abandoned him. We know that because of what he writes later in verse 24, “For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.”
David, and later Jesus, was not making a declarative theological statement about God’s abandonment of his beloved, but using poetic language to describe the feeling of isolation and abandonment brought on by suffering. David knew that God hadn’t really abandoned him. Jesus knew that too. But both felt like He did, and that feeling matters.
The Need for an Aesthetic Hermeneutic
I am a pastor and a theologian, but because I’m an artist as well, I often feel like an outsider in the church. Unfortunately, the artistic dimension is often looked on with suspicion when it tries to weigh in on a deeper or richer understanding of scripture. But it shouldn’t be. Wise biblical interpretation launches from an accurate understanding of the historical, grammatical, and contextual rendering of the passage. There are often layers of aesthetic nuance within a given context. Those harder-to-see-or-appreciate aesthetic nuances are just as important to arriving at accurate exegesis as the role the obvious contextual nuances play.
And this is the point of this essay. The Western church is in deep need of an aesthetic hermeneutic when it comes to reading the Bible. David was a poet and musician. Moses was a historian, poet, polemicist and memoirist. Prophets like Zephaniah and Ezekiel wrote ancient dystopian sci-fi. Jonah is a work of masterful dramatic irony. Jesus was a short story writer, as well as a mesmerizing teacher. Paul was an essayist and scholar. John was not just a memoirist but the equivalent of a modern-day fantasy writer.
None of these things discredit the veracity and reliability of Scripture, but they should be given their legitimate weight when it comes to the interpretation of it. It’s problematic when those entrusted to read and study the bible either have no experience in the world of understanding artful literature, or no respect for it.
Unfortunately, many of the theologically astute artists and poets don’t feel welcomed at the table of biblical interpretation. They often feel resigned to live on the unread outskirts of theological discussion, leaving an aesthetic book to be interpreted and commented on by people who are often unequipped to appreciate the artistic and literary nuances within it.
We don’t need to throw out the commentaries. But we do need to work to find a common language, or at least a middle ground that invites the scholastic and the aesthetic interpretation of the Bible into the same room together.
Ways to cultivate an Aesthetic Hermeneutic
The most basic way to do this is to seek and make room for artists, songwriters, poets, and novelists into the discussion on how to more accurately understand biblical passages. But even that is lacking if we don’t all attempt to bolster our own aesthetic muscles.
1. Read poetry. Good poetry takes work and will make you think. Start with a poem like The Hippopotamus by T.S. Eliot or Mending Wall by Robert Frost and work from there. Also, reach out to poets in your congregation and ask what they like to read.
2. Read good fiction. It’s astounding to me how few pastors read any fiction at all. If they do, it’s the mass-produced serialized fiction that is written more for entertainment and escape than for serious intellectual engagement. Don’t settle for bad writing. Next time you’re wanting to study the story of Cain and Abel, don’t pick up a commentary, pick up Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Read “The Man” in Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. Go out of your way to read beautiful, well written books
3. Be friends with artists and ask humble questions. This one is self-explanatory.
4. Appreciate the beauty of the language, not just the truth to which the language speaks. One of the things I find most amazing about Scripture is the consistent poetic quality of the writing. All of it is well written. The more we appreciate the art of the Bible, the more we will appreciate the artists who wrote it, which will in turn shape the way we understand what they wrote and how it should impact us.
The real danger in excluding an aesthetic hermeneutic is not that our interpretation will be incomplete, but that it might actually be wrong. So, for the sake of hermeneutic integrity, let’s make some room for artistic minds to sit back down at the table and at least be a part of the discussion.