Reading the Bible Intertextually

3: How Does God Act? Intertextual Readings of 1 Corinthians 10

35 gh Michael Schneider 3 How Does God Act? Intertextual Readings of 1 Corinthians 10 * For the English version of this essay, large parts (with the exception of the fourth section) were slightly revised. Prologue: Intertextuality and Inspiration “How is a sermon supposed to be exciting if the Bible is not experienced as exciting?”1 this sentence is a “cry for help from a homiletician who can hardly do his work of the teaching of preaching any more in an adequate manner.”2 the homiletician expressing this cry for help, Martin nicol, asks further: “What should i aim for homiletically if preachers have no inspiring image of what can be expected from the words, images, and stories of the Bible?”3 the following exercises are to be understood as an attempt to envision various possibilities of intertextual reading using a passage from 1 Corinthians 10 as an example. it will thus be shown that the paradigm of intertextuality poses basic hermeneutical and methodological questions of biblical exegesis anew and expands them to a vast degree while also being able to take up the results of classical questions with profit. in short, intertextual reading offers an answer to the question, “What can be expected from the words, images, and stories of the Bible?” Introduction: In the Fictional Woods in his book Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Umberto Eco recounts the following episode: 36 Michael Schneider once upon a time there was vittorio Emanuele iii, the last king of italy, sent into exile after the war. this king did not have much of a reputation for humanistic culture, being more interested in economic and military problems, although he was a keen collector of ancient coins. the story goes that one day he had to open a painting exhibition. Finding himself in front of a beautiful landscape showing a valley with a village running along the slopes of a hill, he looked at the little painted village for a long time, then turned to the director of the exhibition and asked: “How many inhabitants does it have?”4 this passage shows very clearly what must stand at the beginning of every act of reading: “the basic rule in dealing with a work of fiction is that the reader must tacitly accept a fictional agreement, which Coleridge called ‘the suspension of disbelief.’ the reader has to know that what is being narrated is an imaginary story, but he must not therefore believe that the writer is telling lies.”5 Here, a way of reading is postulated that engages not only with the laws of the narrated world in question, it is also limited in the first step of analysis to that information that this world itself can give. this sort of intratextual reading,6 which at the outset attempts to appreciate a text as far as possible without additional intertextual and extratextual information, always raises a series of questions and lets spaces arise that can be filled in a further step of reading.7 For i do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, that our fathers all were under the cloud, and all went through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the one spiritual rock which followed (them), and the rock was Christ. But God did not show favor to most of them, for they were slain in the desert. (1 Cor 10:1-5)8 readers of 1 Corinthians must initially engage certain basic assumptions of the Pauline text that constitute a possible world.9 in this world, there are fathers under/in the cloud and in the sea. in this world, one can be baptized into Moses, take spiritual food into oneself, and be accompanied by a spiritual rock with the name Christ. in order to be able to follow the argumentation of 1 Corinthians further, we must initially admit the view of the world that this passage from 1 Corinthians 10 gives us to read. Eco writes: When we enter the fictional wood, we are certainly supposed to sign a fictional agreement with the author, and we are ready to accept, say, that wolves speak; but when little red riding Hood is eaten by the wolf, we How Does God Act? 37 think she’s dead (and this conviction is...