Reid Dent (33:26)
It's phenomenally good. And there's a scene where there's Father Judd, who's the young priest new to this congregation, and he is trying to embody gentleness and mercy and compassion. The monsignor, who's already there, is like a hard nosed, you know, fierce, fight the world outside kind of guy. And there's a scene where Benoit Blanc, the detective who is the man of logic and the man of being able to connect every piece of evidence to come to, quote, unquote, the truth. He first arrives into the movie. He walks into the church, into this sanctuary, It's a Catholic sanctuary, and there's stained glass and everything. And Father Judd, the younger priest, is in there by himself, and they get to talking about things and just Benoit Blanc's background. And he's basically saying that religion is not for him and that it's just a bunch of stories and that kind of thing. And Father Judd says this. I love this line. I'm going to read it. I wrote it down. Father Judd says, it is storytelling. You're right. He concedes the point. And then he says, I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie, or do they resonate with something deep inside us that's profoundly true, that we can't express any other way except storytelling? And so, yeah, just for everybody's consideration and hopefully for your. A little bit of maybe we can release the pressure on this valve of, like, must be factually true. And this way of, like, looking down on stories, I would just say, what other way would you adequately convey the meaning of looking into your son's eyes for the first time? Or, Marty, when you guys beat us in the AFC Championship game, there's something that happens there, even for something as trivial as sports. Right. But if you wanted to convey what that meant, you would have to go beyond just the fact that, like, Mahomes melted down and Burrow played great and you guys kicked the winning field goal in overtime. Right. You have to reach for something beyond that. And this is something. Again, there are a million experiences. And I think the beautiful thing is that those are not somehow separate experiences from the experience of God, but that God is in and among and working through all of these things. And I would just encourage people to then ask for themselves, you know, what kind of a thing is it? What were the authors trying to do? And what kind of creative freedom do I have to engage with the text and ask questions and go down rabbit trails and wonder about connections and wonder about meanings when I'm not so obsessed with how can I prove that this is like a beat for beat, factual, historical reporting of everything that ever happened. One other little thing that I'll throw out there before we get into Reid's Bible favorites and Reid's tips for reading the Bible. There's a guy named Meyer Sternberg, contemporary of Robert Alter, also wrote about the Bible as Hebrew literature. He's got a great book called the Poetics of Biblical Narrative. And he kind of points out that it's probably not simple. Like, it's not as simple as, well, it's just a story or it's a piece of historical reporting. It's not an either or. But he talks about these three different sort of, I guess, qualities. I think about them as like, on a soundboard, the sliders, you know, that you can push up and down. I think about them as three faders that, depending on what part of the Bible you're in, can be pushed up and down to different degrees. And the first one is history, as in, like, the question of what happened, the events. Right. That's the thing where most of us normally are spending all of our time thinking is like that. But history is only one of the three faders, because another one is that the Bible authors are concerned about is ideology, is what he calls it, or theology, as in, like, what is the meaning? What is the conviction about what this experience means? And then the third one is the aesthetics, as in, like, the style, the presentation, how best to communicate it. And so there might be some parts of the Bible where the history is turned way up and the aesthetics are turned way down, but that doesn't mean it's absolutely at zero. Right. And there might be other parts where, like, the theology is turned way up, but the history is turned down and the aesthetics are somewhere in the middle or whatever. And so, again, it's not a simple task, and I know it's difficult, but it's not a simple task in trying to read and interpret the Bible, of just being like, well, is this fact or fiction? But what is the interplay going on? Which, again, this is a little bit more of, like, a scholarly idea. But I do think it's helpful just to have a framework of, like, oh, I can think about not a polarized either or, but an interplay of history and theology and esthetics.
