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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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