Reading Gaps

Gaps.

Every text contains them. No matter how carefully written, no matter how much attention the author gives to fill in all the details, narratives always contain gaps. Whenever we read a text, we fill them in with our own thoughts.

And this includes biblical texts. The church is notorious for filling gaps in the biblical narrative. One cluster of examples surrounds the birth narratives of Jesus as told in Luke and Matthew’s gospels. Famously, we aren’t told how many wise men were there, though the church filled in this gap by assuming that there were three (and even naming them?!). Another example is the idea that the wise men and the shepherds visited the First Family at the same time. One gap from the Old Testament includes the misconception that the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil was an apple (I suspect that it was actually a kiwi fruit). None of this is in the text.

One big gap that has been consistently filled (and the precise example that triggered this post) concerns the story of Noah and the ark. We find this story in Genesis 6 and it relates the familiar story of the wicked world, the noble Noah and his kin. God tells Noah to build an ark, which he commences to do. Noah builds the ark while his neighbors mock him and deride him. But then when the rains come, his neighbors see the error of their ways and beg and plead with him to let them in. But he can’t (or won't) and they die along with the rest of humanity.

The gap in this story that has been filled in of course, is Noah’s neighbors. The Bible says nothing about Noah’s neighbors. Some are adamant that Noah preached to his neighbors who laughed at him for building an ark. But that view doesn’t come from the text. (I suspect that the view comes from children's Bibles.) So when a commenter on another thread says that “Noah was ridiculed to scorn” in order to explain why many people find Southern Baptists distasteful, he’s citing a story of his own devising.

Oftentimes, we fill in the gaps with our own ideas, which we call theology. Theology, at its most basic level, as our attempt to fill in the gaps in the biblical narrative. How does baptism work? What's the best metaphor for atonement? What does the sovereignty of God look like? 99% of theological disputation is probably reducible to arguing over what interpretation best fills the gaps. (And denominations form over how we fill these gaps). Perhaps this post will remind ME that these gaps exist and I would be better served exercising some hermeneutical humility as I recognize the gaps in my own reading of these texts.