34 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 34-43
Is There a Virtue in This Text? Reading Well through Interpretive Community Zachary Beck East Texas Baptist University
As an English professor at a Baptist university that is unabashed in its framing of learning within Christian faith, I want to train my students to think about literature from a Christian perspective. I teach Critical Theory, a course required for all English majors and education majors who specialize in English. On the first day of class, I teach my students that a critic is first and foremost a reader and that to be a student and critic of literature is to be a student of reading well. But my students quickly encounter perhaps the central question for a Christian reader of literature: to adapt the well-known church song, will they know we are Christians by what we read or how we read? Most students enter my class having defined their identity as Christian readers by their reading of the Bible—what they read. Certainly, Christians have long been recognized as “people of the book,” especially after the Reformation rallying cry of Sola Scriptura. This rallying cry also reveals that many Christian readers find identity as much in the Sola as in the Scriptura—they will know we are Christians by what we don’t read. As Christians we embrace the Bible as the word of God that teaches us about the character of God and our relationship to him. St. Paul writes to Timothy, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tm. 3:16-17, ESV). Conversely, non-scriptural texts must be regarded with suspicion, for they may mislead the Christian reader with false teaching or worldly wiles. Thus, St. Augustine bemoans the waste of his youth studying classical literature: “I was forced to memorise the wanderings of Aeneas— whoever he was—while forgetting my own wanderings; and to weep for the death of Dido who killed herself for love, while bearing dry-eyed my own pitiful state, in that among these studies I was becoming dead to You, O God, my Life” (Confessions I.XIII.20). Augustine’s parents and teachers applauded his mastery of literature and rhetoric when they should have mourned his ignorance of the one true God. While Paul’s commendation of the Scriptures and Augustine’s grief over his benighted soul are true, they do not present the full picture. In his treatise On Christian Doctrine, Augustine argues that non-scriptural texts—even works by pagan authors—can contain valuable truths; he refers to these truths as the Egyptian gold that the Israelites plunder in their escape from bondage (II.40.60). This observation would suggest that how a Christian reads these texts—how one
