Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University

2: Teaching the Ecology of Mark

47 This chapter continues the discussion of the line that Newman momentarily considers between the way of the university and the way of faith. As I argued in the first chapter, reading Genesis as story not only honors that line but makes it even clearer. Ricouer’s theory helps unthicken the images in these ancient texts, and there’s a way in which this “unthickening ” can be seen as exactly the work of the university. Or to return to my metaphor of the “alb,” the work of the university is to make us aware of the vestments that all of us wear, to show that none of us are ever naked. Literature is a particularly good way of doing that work simply because it shows rather than tells. What’s good about the Bible is that it does this showing rather than telling when we least expect it. We expect sermonizing. We expect all the propositional theology we’ve heard about or been exposed to directly, and although that theology is “in” there in a sense, in another sense it’s not. The text is naked in some sense, and this is as true for the gospel of Mark as it is for Genesis. Though Mark is written in Greek, centuries later, it shares with Genesis, as Reynolds Price has noted, the same devotion to the devices of “story.” “What matters to Mark,” Price says, “is what mattered to the great J writer in the Hebrew Bible.” Their central concern is with “the literal line which human action makes on the surface of time and place, and with the degree to which we can infer from those writers’ words alone” greater and more suggestive meaning (60). This chapter, then, continues the discussion of the last through an analysis of Mark, then steps back to talk about the process of writing more generally, then concludes—drawing on the thinking in both this and the last chapter—by developing a theory of education both Biblical c h a p t e r 2 Teaching the Ecology of Mark Anderson.Teaching 9/30/04 4:21 PM Page 47 Teaching as Believing 48 and ecological. What we do here with Mark is what we do in all classes at the university, or should, and to reflect on this is to inquire into the idea of the university. Mark as Story Genesis, then, shows rather than tells. That’s all. It works through image rather than explicit commentary, at least most of the time, and it does this in very few, though very artful, very crafted, words. This is the sense in which the gospels, too, can be understood as literature. This is the sense, O’Connor’s sense, in which they are “fiction,” exactly fiction: not because they don’t try to tell the truth but because they do, the messy, recalcitrant , irreducible truth of the concrete life we actually live. Students are surprised when the Gospel of Mark begins without the Christmas stories but instead with John the Baptist thundering in the wilderness and the baptism of Jesus, and they continue to be surprised. Mark’s language is spare to the point of choppy, his quick cuts between pieces of narrative nearly collage-like. “The style is terse,” David Rhoads and Donald Michie say in Mark as Story. “The narrator ‘shows’ the action directly” (44–45). This happens and then this happens, immediately and without preamble—the phrase “at once” and the word “immediately” appear nearly fifty times in the story—and much is unexplained, simply presented, starkly and vividly, without Mark intervening as narrator and explicitly interpreting the details. In novelist Price’s contemporary translation , without chapter and verse notations, the text not in columns but moving across the page like any other book, the baptism is described with a moving awkwardness and economy: It happened in those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John. At once going up out of the water he saw the sky torn open and the Spirit like a dove descending to him. There was a voice out of the sky, “You are my Son the loved one. In you I have delighted.” (87) Mark’s Roman contemporaries, trained like Augustine in the Confessions four centuries later in the long oratorical flourishes of Greco-Roman rhetoric, found language like this ungrammatical and undramatic and unconvincing, a reason for ridicule, and Price captures this roughness in what he claims...