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Do
preachers over-explain?
by
Doug Jackson
Do preachers over-explain? Do listeners over-analyze? If we
believe the Bible, why don’t we trust it?
Adrian Brine and Michael York, in their book, A
Shakespearean Actor Prepares, ask and offer answers to
similar questions about the Bard. (Shakespeare wrote at the same
time the King James Version was being translated - legend even
has it that he was a consultant. The KJV isn’t the original
manuscript, but enough people think so to make the analogy
valid.) The authors set themselves against the great Russian
teacher and director Stanislavsky, who taught his students to
formulate each character’s "super-objective," the
one thing he really wants, and then to draw on an emotional
memory in which the player has felt the same desire.
To all this impressive apparatus, Brine and York offer a
simple alternative: speak the lines.
Shakespeare’s characters, they argue, are too complex to
have a single motivation, and their emotions are too big to be
understood by the average person. My jealousy as compared to
Othello’s, or my self-doubt placed alongside Hamlet’s, is
like a paper clip to a battleship: both are made of metal, but
there the comparison ends. The Bard, say these writers, infused
his lines with such power that, in saying them, one experiences
emotions he could never conjure up on his own.
As Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem, "Shakespeare,"
"Others abide our question. Thou are free." In other
words, it’s no good asking what Shakespeare "means".
(Perhaps the best answer to that sort of question was given by
Tom Stoppard. Asked what his bewildering but financially
successful post-modern romp "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead" was "about," he replied, "It’s
about to make me a rich man.")
I sometimes wonder if we spend too much time asking what the
Bible "means". I’m a good Reformation scholar,
firmly wedded to the grammatical/historical method of exegesis,
but I sometimes fear that I’m so busy deciding what I’ll do
to the text that I never ask what the text wants to do to me. As
Calvin Miller writes of the preaching of Jesus, "His sermon
on the Mount is his only entire sermon mentioned and can be
preached in 18 minutes. In an economy of 2,320 words, Jesus
spends 348 on such images as wolves, sheep, light, rock, sand,
and storms." Not once, I might add, does he conjugate a
Greek verb or mention "soteriology".
Brine and York, noting the Shakespeare/King James
connection, point out that the frontispiece of the original
edition states, "Appointed to be read in churches."
Not explained, not exegeted, not outlined or underlined, but
read. It’s almost as if they believed the words contain the
Word, and would do their work on their own.
So try something radical: read the Bible. No, you won’t
understand it all and you’ll want to look some stuff up later,
but not until you see what happens. The first time I read
Hamlet’s famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy, I
had no idea what a fardle was, but by the time I reached
the end, I was a different person.
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