Reflections on If Truth Were A Child

Reflections on If Truth Were A Child by George Handley

I particularly liked two of the last few essays, On the Moral Risks of Reading Scripture, and Reading and the Menardian Paradox in 3 Nephi.

Handley points out that the scriptures blast misinterpretation of the scriptures as a serious sin – both Peter and Alma speak of people wresting the scriptures unto their own destruction (2 Peter 3:16, Alma 13:20). And yet, Nephi speaks of the need for readers to liken scriptures, or translate a text from its context to the context of the reader. So here is the challenge: we have to liken the scripture to our own circumstances, but the possibility of misinterpretation is destructive.

 This challenge is related to another dichotomy – that between textual determinism (“it is merely and always the text that produces meaning, never the reader”) and reader response theory (“all readings are produced primarily or even solely by the context of the reader”) (196, 214). Both theories cannot really be applied to scripture. Textual determinism fails because the scriptures ask to be likened and pondered in ways that put the onus on the reader to create meaning. However, the other extreme fails because “it gives license to the reader to imagine whatever the reader desires God’s will to be. The sacred text becomes a mirror, saying back to us only what we already wanted to find” (227). So what is the solution to this dichotomy?

Handley seems to suggest that it is in imagination -- “a faithful reading imagines a voice speaking to us in our circumstances and yet coming from beyond them” (228). I was struck by Handley’s reminder that the often-neglected context of the well-known scripture from the Doctrine and Covenants in which God urges Oliver Cowdery to “study it out in your mind” is that Oliver Cowdery was attempting to translate a text that he could neither read, write, understand, or speak. Just as Oliver Cowdery was asked to exercise significant imagination in his translation effort, we are also asked to exercise significant imagination in our translations of the scriptures from their original context to the context of our own lives. “Divine language,” Handley writes, “is not merely the transfer of information but a poetic reformation of a higher idea.” (224).

But how do we know that the voice we are imagining coming to us in our reading is really a divine voice? Could this imagination be another form of finding in the scriptures whatever we already wanted to find?

Handley writes that “a good reading is a response to a semiotic pattern already established in the text” (232). We are all to plant and nourish the seed of faith mentioned in the parable of the sower and in Alma 32. Scripture shows us not only sacred text, but also reveals how to react to sacred text. Matthew is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible who endeavors to align prophecy with Jesus’ life. Nephi creatively riffs on Isaiah and prays to understand the vision of the tree of life (even though the vision didn’t initially have a clear message for him). Nathan’s indictment “thou art the man” to King David at the conclusion of the parable of the poor man’s ewe lamb in 2 Samuel 12 “metaphorizes the narrative” and prompts the prophet’s audience to ponder how they are akin to the “bad guy” in the parable (201). There will always be risk involved in interpretation and imagination. Nevertheless, the promise of Alma 32 is that reading scripture with attention to how the text wants to be read and a willingness to be transformed will change the reader’s life for the better.