Introduction
One efficient way to discover the ethos of an interpreter is to observe her response to the pregnant question: ‘What are you afraid this text will say?’ Some interpreters will make an attempt to name the interpretation they dread, and some will even try to explain why. But for others, even to voice the feared implication is to say too much. To speak it aloud is to grant it legitimacy. For such interpreters, resistance is the only conceivable response.
The phenomenon that is known as ‘imaginative resistance’ in literary, psychological and philosophical circles is something akin to the hesitancy described above. But to use the phrase ‘imaginative resistance’ in the household of theology may invite a certain degree of misunderstanding. Some theologians might expect or hope that imaginative resistance refers to the efforts scholars, teachers and pastors might make to encourage people to imagine resisting the powers and principalities, ideologies and hegemonies that haunt the world, in the hopes that they will go out and in some way practise the resistance they have imagined. And that is certainly a worthy endeavour. But the kind of imaginative resistance at issue here is a dynamic that is more fundamental still. Before you can talk about imaginative resistance as a strategy, you must address it in its first and less conscious form.
What is this ‘first-order’ imaginative resistance? In a fictive context, readers are willing to imagine all sorts of impossible and fantastical things, but they refuse to imagine that something they find morally reprehensible is good. Those who interpret the Bible, especially those who interpret it as scripture, are by no means strangers to this dynamic. There are many texts in the canon with fearsome moral implications, and not just those we identify as ‘texts of terror’. The ongoing multi-disciplinary conversation about imaginative resistance could be a helpful resource in understanding when and why interpreters of the Bible resist particular texts and to what end, but thus far the literature lacks any sustained attention to the theological dimensions inevitably involved when the text in question is read as ‘Word of God’. Karl Barth's theological hermeneutic is a place to begin to address this lacuna. Not because he offers a ‘solution’ to imaginative resistance in relation to interpreters of biblical texts, but because Barth's ethos of interpretation acknowledges, deepens and redescribes it.
This article explores the overlapping territory between the phenomenon of imaginative resistance and Karl Barth's theological hermeneutic. It is structured as follows: first, an overview of the scholarly discussion of the phenomenon of imaginative resistance, with particular attention to the most promising hypotheses explaining why it occurs; second, an exposition of Barth's approach to interpreting the Bible as scripture and his description of the ethos of the interpreter; and third, an examination of the intersection and overlap between current theories regarding the origins of imaginative resistance and Barth's theological hermeneutic, identifying areas of fruitful convergence.
Imaginative resistance
While the term ‘imaginative resistance’ first emerged in the 1990s, the dynamic it describes is a legacy from David Hume's influential essay, ‘On the Standard of Taste’, in which he advises his readers to resist when an author or artist demands solidarity with morally repugnant sentiments or characters.Footnote 1 In the contemporary discussion, the focus often concerns the way in which narrators function in relation to the stories they tell. Among other things, the narrator shapes our responses to the plot, the characters and the setting, providing the framework which guides our experience of the story. The narrator tells about some things and not others, the narrator creates the mood, and, most significantly, the narrator makes judgements about characters and situations. Usually, the narrator or author doesn't come right out and tell us, ‘Here is the framework for this story’. Instead, the framework sneaks up on us, and before we know it we are in some sense beginning to imitate the narrator's way of attending to the elements of the story, seeing the world of the story through the narrator's eyes. In subtle and not so subtle ways we often find ourselves adopting the narrator's framework as our own.
If we give our consent and allow ourselves to be shaped and guided in this way, narration is a powerful tool for a writer. Adopting the framework of the narrator also has rewards for readers – it ensures that we will respond to the events/characters in the story as the author intended. Narrative fictions, like other kinds of art, enable us to have a vicarious experience of something otherwise inaccessible to us. And by showing us the good in a point of view other than our own, skilful narration can, of course, change hearts and minds in positive ways, enlarging our ability to imaginatively enter into the experience of others.Footnote 2 We may even transfer the insights we gain in imagined worlds into our lives here and now, challenging some features of the ‘real’ world – that second type of ‘imaginative resistance’ described above.
But sometimes readers refuse to put on the narrator's spectacles. Sometimes the framework itself becomes visible to us in troubling ways and we cannot – or will not – imagine things from the narrator's point of view.Footnote 3 Usually, we have no trouble giving our consent to storytellers, even when their framework includes the conviction that things like dragons or talking animals or intergalactic space travel are real. In fact, we can accept and imagine all sorts of implausible and fantastic elements in a story without hesitation. But ‘imaginative resistance’ refers to the times when we do not give consent; when the framework of the story asks us to respond in ways we find morally questionable. In other words, we have no problem imagining the dementors of the Harry Potter books, but cannot imagine a universe in which ‘racism is good’ or ‘infanticide is a responsible form of population control’. To be clear: this does not mean we cannot give our consent to a story in which racism or infanticide occur. That is not the issue. Imaginative resistance is not about the things themselves but about the response the storyteller's framework demands in relation to those things.Footnote 4 As philosopher Kendall Walton puts it: ‘There is science fiction; why not morality fiction?’Footnote 5 It seems that ‘morality fiction’ doesn't work very well, if ‘very well’ means reading with – not against – the storyteller.
So why exactly does imaginative resistance occur? This a question that philosophers and literary theorists and social scientists have been asking for some time now, with varying hypotheses. But there are four theories that are particularly illuminating.
Fear of ‘real’ change
Tamar Szabó Gendler argues that readers may resist a narrator because even to pretend to accept a morally upside-down world feels wrong.Footnote 6 We may be worried that to even imagine feeling positively about a torturer might influence the way we feel about such people in real life. We may fear that to give in to that perspective or framework, even taking pleasure in it in the context of the story, might change our point of view in actuality. Is how we feel about fictional things how we really feel about them? When readers become conscious that the author or narrator wants to change them, the resistance deepens further. If we sense that the framework of the narrator encourages us to export those attitudes we find reprehensible into the real world, we dig in our heels.Footnote 7
Guilt by association
We may resist an upsetting narrator because we don't like to get too close to those we passionately disagree with in any context. We don't want to feel the way they feel even about an imaginary situation, because that brings us closer to those who actually feel that way.Footnote 8 We don't want to be in solidarity with those who do things or think things that trouble us. We want to disassociate, not draw near.Footnote 9
Narrator lacks credentials
Derek McTravers hypothesises that the ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’ is bound up with questions of authority, namely, the nature of the authority we ascribe to a fictional narrator/author.Footnote 10 McTravers invites his readers to think about the way we react to a news correspondent. Since we have no direct access to the events the reporter describes, if we find the news agency trustworthy to begin with, we will accept the reporter's account of a particular event. The reporter has privileged information when it comes to the events in question. However, should the reporter make a moral claim about an event, everything changes. While the reporter does know more than we do when it comes to the incident, the reporter doesn't know more than we do when it comes to assessing the rightness or wrongness of things.
It is something like that when it comes to the kind of authority we give to a storyteller, McTravers argues. Naturally, the narrator/author knows more than we do when it comes to the characters and events in the fictional world the author has created. But the narrator/author does not necessarily have privileged information about moral or ethical truth. When it comes to things like values, moral judgements or worldview, we do not consider the narrator to have privileged information. We may admire the moral convictions of a particular news analyst – but that is probably because we share her convictions. We accept a correspondent's superiority when it comes to reporting events, but have no problem arguing with her when we disagree with her assessment of the rightness or wrongness of those events. So it is when it comes to storytellers: tell us the story, you are in charge of that. But when it comes to defining what is good, we are equally qualified. Who are you narrator, to tell us how to think about such things! We will push back if necessary.
Lack of context
A final contender in the quest for an explanation for imaginative resistance – in some contrast to the above – does not locate the source of the resistance in the fear of consequences, discomfort due to proximity to a morally objectionable other or denial of the narrator's moral authority. Instead, as Kathleen Stock explains, imaginative resistance occurs when there is a failure to imagine a context in which the offending sentiment would be true. As she writes,
A single moral proposition, in which a moral judgement, employing either a thick or thin moral concept, is related to some descriptive proposition containing relatively little other information, is likely to evoke imaginative failure wherever it is unclear to the reader or hearer how the situation so described could warrant such a judgement. One's inability to engage imaginatively will be surmounted if the description is supplemented by further descriptions which make clear how such a moral judgement might apply.Footnote 11
A sentence like ‘Markus lovingly threw the child to the ground’, for example, provokes the reader to resist, but not once we learn a tiger is approaching.
Whether it's because we worry that such pretending might infect us in real life or because getting close to someone morally unacceptable feels bad or because we limit the authority of the narrator when it comes to right and wrong or because we don't have access to the context we need to imagine a moral/ethical paradigm shift or all of the above, there are some places we simply will not let our imagination take us. When we become aware that our deepest convictions are threatened by what the narrator asks of us, we take protective action. We do not succumb to the contagion that is the narrator's way of seeing things; instead, we put the story, the ‘world’, the text, in quarantine. We limit what it is able to do. In quarantine it cannot touch us and our deepest commitments. We are safe.
If the impulse described above is present in relation to any text, how much more present it must be when it comes to a text like the Bible, particularly when it is read as ‘Word of God’. Resistance to transformation, fear of solidarity with the wrong people, ambiguity regarding authorial authority and lack of context – all of these factors are alive and well when we turn our attention to the question of imaginative resistance and the interpreter of the Bible as scripture. How might the addition of a theological thick description illuminate the unique conditions under which believers interpret (and resist) their Holy Book? To answer that question we begin with an overview of Karl Barth's theological hermeneutic of scripture.
Karl Barth and the ‘healthy strangeness’ of scripture
By 1916, Karl Barth was a small-town pastor and committed socialist in the midst of a theological identity crisis. His response to this state of affairs was to embark on a Bible study, one which would result in the publication of two feverish commentaries on Paul's epistle to the Romans. These two versions ultimately induced theological identity crises of their own across contexts and national borders. Among other things, the commentaries captured the attention of many academics and pastors because of their surprising hermeneutic. What was surprising about it?
In a theological environment where the historical-critical method exerted a nearly unchallenged authority over what the Bible could and could not say, Barth demoted historical-critical research from a final word to a helpful and necessary tool, one step on the way to listening for the Word, the ‘something more’, to which the Bible points.Footnote 12 Barth offered a corrective to the tendency to reduce the text to a source of information about something in the past and a challenge to the assumption that the best exegesis is done by disinterested and clinical observers. At a time when most biblical scholars were trained to scrutinise biblical texts from a safe distance with their own version of what we now call a hermeneutic of suspicion, Barth rehabilitated a meta-critical hermeneutic of trust.Footnote 13 ‘There is a stream in the Bible’, Barth said in a lecture in 1916, ‘that carries us away once we have entrusted ourselves to it; it carries us from ourselves to the seas!’Footnote 14
With Schleiermacher, Barth recognised that there can be no presuppositionless exegesis. What is the Bible's subject matter (Sache)? What is its function? An interpreter's answers to those questions will profoundly affect how she interprets any of its parts. If the Bible is a source of information about human piety or history or religious experience, Barth argued, then that is what will be discerned. But why would we assume the Bible is primarily about some aspect of human being? Even if that aspect of human being is the human personality of Jesus?
Barth's study of Romans led him to the conclusion that what consumed Paul and every other prophet and apostle in the Bible was the desire to point away from themselves and toward the God who is God. The heartbeat of Barth's theological and hermeneutical ‘turn’, then, is a radical affirmation of the subjectivity of God. Barth became convinced that knowledge of God cannot be discerned in the depths of the human soul or read off of human history; it cannot be constructed with the right philosophical or theological tools; and, as we shall see, it is not contained within the Bible. There is no bridge to the ‘otherness’ of God from the human side, because only God can know God. For this reason Barth sometimes describes what happens in the event of revelation as a person being taken up and enabled to participate – albeit actualistically – in God's self-knowing. Knowledge of God, then, never becomes a possession that human beings can seize and subsequently wield, but only occurs as a miraculous event in which a human being finds herself seized and summoned to faith and obedience. Both in his early exposition of the Word of God in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics and in his later reconsideration of revelation in the context of the doctrine of reconciliation, this decentring of human knowers remains a constant.
But if the Bible in itself does not contain knowledge of God, why does Barth think it is absolutely indispensable? What does he mean when he affirms it as ‘Word of God’?
Barth's description of the threefold Word is well known, and we will not rehearse it in detail here.Footnote 15 It is enough to say that, for Barth, the Word of God is most simply and profoundly Jesus Christ himself, God with humanity, in his particular history: elect, begotten, incarnate, alive, dead, risen, present and coming again. Jesus Christ is God's speech; the event of God's decision towards human beings.Footnote 16 The prophets and apostles are empowered to be witnesses to this living Word, and when by God's intervention they are, their witness becomes Word of God as well. Note the distinction: Jesus Christ is Word of God. The witness of the Bible must become Word of God. Barth's ordering of the threefold Word privileges the testimony of the prophets and apostles in their proximity to the objective history of Jesus Christ. As a concrete artefact of past listening to and pointing toward God's self-revealing, scripture has a ‘unique dignity’, and as such it functions as a norm for all subsequent witness to this Word, including that of preaching.Footnote 17 As later witnesses seek to testify to the hope that is in them, they are bound to listen for a Word from the Lord in concert with these particular others – the prophets and apostles – in the expectation and with the prayer that God will make the voices which speak in scripture faithful witnesses again.
While this is unmistakably a ‘high view’ of scripture, Barth's identification of Jesus Christ as the Word of God dramatically relativises all human speaking about God, including the writings of the Old and New Testaments. Barth's affirmation of the indispensability of the Bible for subsequent witnesses does not entail the affirmation of its intrinsic perfection or holiness. Human words are always feeble, broken, fragile, impotent, inescapably profane and hopelessly inadequate for the task of speaking of God in and of themselves, according to Barth. The prophets and apostles are captives of their culture and environment, they are not ‘inerrant proclaimers of all and every truth’, and they are ‘all vulnerable and therefore capable of error even in respect of religion and theology’.Footnote 18 Barth insists interpreters must ‘dare to face the humanity of the biblical texts and therefore their fallibility’.Footnote 19 Again, if they are to be revelation, they can only become so; they must become what they are.Footnote 20
And what are they? A chorus of diverse voices who address us with the strange declaration of God's decision toward us, Barth explains, something which we cannot tell ourselves. For Barth, the church is – or should be – the place where the testimony of the prophets and apostles is accepted in spite of its strangeness.Footnote 21 To hear scripture in its ‘otherness’ is to acknowledge its freedom (or, rather, God's freedom) to speak in this way, a way distinct from what the Christian community says to itself or to others.Footnote 22 The recognition of the ‘healthy strangeness’ of the Bible as witness prevents it from being dissolved or domesticated into the church's word.Footnote 23 In other words, precisely because of its strange and trans-contextual horizon, when it becomes what it is, it can call the Christian community and its agendas into question.
What are the practical implications of Barth's treatment of the Bible as scripture for the task of interpretation?
First, a theological hermeneutic is something that emerges in the practice of exegesis itself, rather than a method that is outlined in abstracto. To be an interpreter of the Bible as scripture is to be addressed by God, to be placed in relationship with the prophets and apostles. No method can make that transposition happen, rather, a fitting method is one that acknowledges that it has happened and prays for it to happen again. Barth's approach to the question of how interpreters ‘get on’ thus begins and ends with the anticipation and/or acknowledgement of the new situation wrought by God's gracious address.
Second, while the interpreters of the Bible as scripture should make use of historical-critical and other tools to gain a basic understanding, a ‘picture’, of ‘what is there’ in the text, these tools can only take an interpreter so far. The stance of the critic dissecting the text must give way to one more appropriate to the subject matter at hand. Barth invites the interpreter to stand with the biblical writers, looking where they are looking, rather than standing over against them, parsing their psyches or contexts or worldviews instead of taking their words seriously as witnesses to revelation.Footnote 24 The determination to stand with rather than against a writer (which can include what Barth considers ‘loyal opposition’ at times) is grounded in Barth's conviction that in the deepest sense the biblical writers and present-day interpreters are contemporaries. In relation to the Sache of the Bible, we are with them. Their story is our story. Our lives intersect with theirs.
Have I experienced anything more important, incisive, serious, contemporary than this, that I have been personally present and have shared in the crossing of Israel through the Red Sea but also in the adoration of the golden calf, in the baptism of Jesus but also in the denial of Peter and the treachery of Judas, that all this has happened to me here and now? If I believe, then this must be the right point of view.Footnote 25
Finally, Barth does not conceive of the relationship between a biblical witness and the interpreter as a negotiation of meaning between two equals. Barth ‘flips’ the text/interpreter relationship: when scripture becomes what it is, we are not the interpreters, but the interpreted.
The ethos that corresponds to this reversal is humility. Barth's interpreter relinquishes the quest for control, dominance, mastery over the text – he is someone so captivated that he lays down his weapons. Barth uses the language of subordination to describe this dynamic, but he does not mean the surrendered interpreter ceases to be who he is:
It is not as though we had simply to abandon and forget our ideas, thoughts and convictions. We certainly cannot do that, just as little as we can free ourselves from our own shadow. Nor should we try to do it; for that would be arrogance rather than humility. Subordination does not mean the elimination and annihilation of our own resources. Subordination implies that the subordinate is there as such and remains there. It means placing oneself behind, following, complying as subordinate to superior.Footnote 26
The interpreter Barth describes will likely have strong suspicions and reservations in relation to the biblical text, but to read the Bible as scripture means that these are not as strong as the desire to draw near and listen to the strange declaration of God's decision to be with and for human beings in Jesus Christ. It is a risk to surrender ourselves to it, Barth argues. We may well become suspicious of our suspicions, find our agendas called into question, find our reservations overcome. To pray that God will make the prophets and apostles what they are is a dangerous thing, according to Barth. Would-be interpreters are always tempted to keep biblical texts in quarantine, tame and safe. A useful means to some predetermined end, perhaps, but that is all.
As we have seen, both Barth and contemporary theorists of imaginative resistance describe an interpretative dynamic that can result in a text in quarantine. But what happens when we put current theories regarding the origins of imaginative resistance and Barth's theological hermeneutic in conversation? How might Barth's theological thick description supplement the existing conversation when it comes to the unique dynamics involved in interpreting the Bible as scripture?
Imaginative resistance in theological perspective
The ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’ that has sparked lively conversation in recent years refers to the behaviour of readers who are willing to imagine completely implausible things at the behest of the narrator, but they refuse to imagine that something that they find ethically reprehensible is good. Do we find room for this sort of resistance in Barth's theological hermeneutic? Yes, in more than one sense, and with some redefinition.
First, because Barth affirms the utter humanity of the prophets and apostles (and their words), imaginative resistance on the part of the interpreter of the Bible is inevitable, or should be. The biblical writers are alien to us in their assumptions, cultural biases, orientation to the world and therefore surely in their moral, ethical and, Barth might add, theological convictions. The post-moderns among us may not give ready consent to, say, descriptions of miraculous events, but isn't just about everyone troubled by the narrator's framework when it comes to things like the flood, the almost-sacrifice of Isaac or the ‘one strike you're out’ logic of the story of Ananias and Sapphira? Imaginative resistance in this ‘surface’ sense is a consequence of the affirmation of what Barth calls the ‘vulnerability’ of the biblical writings.
Second, once we add the moniker ‘Word of God’ to the equation, this initial resistance is deepened, not resolved. Why does this complicate matters? For one thing, it is no longer a lone narrator/author and framework which trouble us. Now we not only have a narrator/framework we don't trust, but we have another authorial presence to contend with (if we affirm this is somehow ‘of God’) and hence (perhaps) another framework. Thinking after Barth, this dialectic of frameworks is evident to interpreters because scripture can only become what it is. Until it does so, there is a distance between the fragility of the prophets and apostles and the promise of divine self-disclosure – a distance that prompts its own kind of imaginative resistance in the interpreter. Even if we are willing to imagine that there is a miraculous connection between the Bible's strange chorus of voices and ‘Word of God’, is it not the case that the identification of a biased, flawed human book with the speech of God is morally and ethically disturbing and calls for resistance?
Third, if by divine intervention scripture becomes what it is, does this miracle mean the end of the interpreter's resistance? For Barth, it is only here that the most significant resistance begins. For one thing, the kinds of imaginative resistance described above do not disappear when the prophets and apostles become witnesses to an event of revelation. Interpreters subordinate their objections and agendas; they do not, cannot and should not suppress them completely. But even more profoundly, it is when the interpreter is actually placed with the biblical writers and addressed by the Word of God that a new kind of resistance comes into view. The event of revelation announces who we truly are, Barth contends. Who are we? God's decision to be for humanity and never to be without us means that the true ‘being’ of human beings is safe and secure, constituted and held by God's electing, justifying and sanctifying grace in Jesus Christ. As such, human beings are protected ontologically by God even when their refusal to live in correspondence to this being threatens them ontically and alienates them from their true selves.Footnote 27 For Barth then, human existence involves two distinct but inseparable histories: the history of the sinner fading to nothing, and the history of the true self gaining strength as it advances. It is not only scripture – human beings also must become who they are. For this reason, the interpreter faced with the strange declaration of who she is in Christ in the event of revelation may experience another sort of imaginative resistance, the resistance to a narrator who reveals her true identity, thus calling her decaying identity as ‘sinner’ (and everything it entails) into question.
In each case above, imaginative resistance may tempt an interpreter to put a biblical text in quarantine. But do people who quarantine the Bible do so for the same reasons postulated by literary critics, philosophers and psychologists? How does a theological account contribute to the four explanations for imaginative failure we explored earlier, rendering them more suitable for application to a ‘holy book’? We take each in turn.
Fear of ‘real’ change
While we may suspect that the author of a novel wants us to export certain attitudes into the ‘real’ world, when it comes to interpreting the Bible, for many this is not just a suspicion but an avowed hope and expectation. But this hope and expectation may be precisely the reason certain texts end up in quarantine. Barth might ask: do we really want our real opinions, plans, dreams, ethics or moral vision to be changed? Are we even willing to imagine the inversion of our values, in spite of much enthusiastic rhetoric? Barth argues we are right to be afraid, for not only is the Bible a strange horizon, it is a disruptive, unsettling one, especially when it becomes what it is.
Guilt by association
Is imaginative resistance born of a desire to stay far away from people with perspectives we find reprehensible or unpalatable? If so, then we can expect it in those who interpret scripture, since the Bible has its share of people like that. But for Barth, this is a resistance we must resist, not just in interpreting the Bible but in interpreting everything. The only place for the interpreter to stand is with the witness or writer, looking where they are looking. ‘This door can only be opened from within’, Barth writes.Footnote 28
Narrator lacks credentials
Some explanations for imaginative resistance argue that the nature of the authority we grant to the narrator/author is key, and of course, authority is a contested issue when it comes to the Bible as well. Do interpreters of the Bible as scripture resist because we don't trust the writers when it comes to ethical judgements? What do we think the prophets and apostles are qualified to tell us? Do we allow them to shape our imaginations when it comes to reporting about people and situations far removed from us, but not so much when it comes to moral vision? If that is the case, then this attitude, conscious or not, stands in some contrast to what many of us affirm about the way scripture functions in our communities, namely, that we are not so hung up on the accuracy of the Bible with regard to every historical event, for example, but we do embrace it as something like ‘the definitive guide to faith and life’. How can that be the case if it is precisely at the places where scripture's storytellers have a distinctive point of view in relation to faith and life that we are most inclined to keep it at a safe distance? As far as Barth is concerned, of course, ‘authority’ is not a property of the prophets and apostles, but something that we acknowledge when God makes them what they are. Even then, it is relative. But the issue is really located further in. Do we trust God's moral and ethical judgement? Even, maybe especially, when it comes to who we are? Barth's relentless attention to the ethos of the interpreter allows room for this primal mistrust, even as it is subordinated.
Lack of context
In some ways, this final explanation is the most resonant of all when it comes to Barth's theological hermeneutic of scripture. Perhaps imaginative resistance does occur when there is a failure to imagine a context in which an offending sentiment would be true. Not only is it the case that Barth's hermeneutic involves ceaseless movement between the parts and the whole of the Bible and its subject matter, so it is always a matter of trying to situate (or better, to be situated!) in relation to the widest possible horizon. But the ‘lack of context’ explanation also brings us back to the wholly otherness of God, and to the confession that we only see what we see in part, dimly and (as far as Barth is concerned) temporarily. The fullest context of the witness of scripture is the triune life itself. And what could that be to us, but unimaginable? Perhaps this recognition is enough to prompt an interpreter to surrender, even when the mirror is very dim indeed.
Conclusion
Interpreters of the Bible as scripture are no strangers to the phenomenon of ‘imaginative resistance’. The scholarly conversation thus far has described the dynamic and offered possible explanations for it in relation to works of fiction, but has yet to consider how it functions in relation to the interpretation of a text readers identify as ‘Word of God’. Karl Barth's theological hermeneutic is one approach that offers the kind of thick description that is needed.
I suspect most of us are able to imagine the Genesis creation accounts or instantaneous healings or miraculous fish dinners even though we might have a range of ways of making sense out of those sorts of stories. I suspect that the times we pull back and refuse to imagine with scripture have more to do with the very sorts of things that constitute imaginative resistance in other contexts: times when the narrator asks us to see something we find disturbing as faithful or good. We are tempted to quarantine texts that threaten our convictions with respect to these qualities. Barth's approach does not constitute a denial of imaginative resistance, nor an attempt to eliminate it. Instead, Barth imagines a situation in which an interpreter of the Bible freely places herself and her objections in quarantine, at least long enough to hear the strange declaration that she has been healed.Footnote 29
