On Ways to Misunderstand Audiobooks

This month, I'm focusing on audiobooks in blog-land, for several reasons . . .

☔ Audiobooks make outdoor reading weatherproof (and in my area, the transition from spring to summer is a bit unpredictable weather-wise).

🤔 I do have access to Audible, after all. Maybe I should use it. I also have access to Smidgen Press's new AI-generated audiobook recording of The Lost Dragon of Wessex so am taking advantage of that!

👶 Child is becoming more exploratory, making audiobooks a sensible choice for getting reading done while providing adequate supervision and engagement.

👂 Some cultures still use oral-language to transmit traditions and knowledge over periods of history. Who knows, audiobooks may eventually contribute to that for ours!

All that said, I'm still somewhat new to the audiobook world, but not to the book world! My friend and fellow literary blogger Beth mentioned earlier this year that audiobooks help her to appreciate pronunciation of unfamiliar words and place/character names as compared to a non-audio version. But that leads to the difficulty of possibly misunderstanding those words the first time (or few) they're pronounced. 

What about the angle of someone misunderstanding the content itself, at a superficial or deeper level? That's what I will scratch the surface of, in this week's post! As you might have guessed, I've been inspired in part by 3 recent N. T. Wright books that I've been listening to on audiobook:

• Paul: A Biography
• Commentary on Galatians
• How God Became King (here's a 1-hour video lecture on the book here from when he spoke at Calvin College)

How to Read for Understanding

I may or may not have mentioned previously on this blog--I struggled as a child with reading comprehension, despite being a somewhat early reader (~3 years old). Mom worked with me on seeing the forest, not just the trees, which was quite uncomfortable and effortful at the time. It still is, now, but it's easier because I have more background knowledge about most content I'm reading. There are three scaffolded strategies that you can use to read anything for understanding, particularly Scripture.

Phonics

While the teaching of phonics has been de-emphasized over the years in practice, and certain poems have been written to emphasize the limitations of phonics, there is much merit to this approach as the earliest part of formal reading. I have this book on my wish list for when Child shows readiness for phonics because I am a firm believer in the ability of phonics knowledge to unlock a large amount of the English language for a reader. It may be a while, though, since he sits in one place for a maximum of 4 board book pages . . .

However, if phonics is just learning how to sound out unfamiliar words according to the rules of a language, how does that connect to understanding a text, especially without interpretive pictures? Here's my line of thought:

1. Language follows patterns, and written languages use alphabets that also follow patterns, whether within individual words or larger units of text.
2. One cannot have an idea of what a text says unless one is told about it, read aloud the text by another, or reads the text themselves.
3. In order to read a text aloud to oneself or another, one must have a sense of how to transform the written words into intelligible speech (phonics or some other method).
4. Mispronounced words can be mistaken for other words or otherwise not understood if the pronunciation doesn't match what the hearer expects based on their past experience with the language.
5. Phonics knowledge (on the reader's part) increases the likelihood of correctly pronouncing all or most words.
6. Understanding or comprehension isn't possible unless someone has an idea of what the text says.
7. Therefore understanding of a text isn't as likely without phonics knowledge as with phonics knowledge.

(I have read through this logic and philosophy book recently, but my deductive logic skills and premise construction may be a little underdeveloped because that's outside my line of work. I welcome your constructive critiques and feedback!)

Context, Context, Context!

In the health care field, training after training, and article after review article, emphasizes the need for providers to pay attention to context of interpersonal communication. TeamSTEPPS is an example of a nationally standardized training for providers and student providers. Why? Communication, attentive to the whole context, reduces medical error, cost, and lives lost.

In everyday reading or listening to read-aloud books/audiobooks, lack of attention to context may not be immediately fatal to life, but it's pretty important, starting with the earliest readers.

So, how do you consider the context when reading the Bible (as one example)? Whether you're a layperson or a more trained theologian, you need to know something about hermeneutics, the structured process and study of Biblical interpretation. Grasping God's Word by Duvall & Hays is a college-level (pre-seminary) text that was helpful in introducing me to a relatively balanced approach to the field. Here are some takeaways from their approach:

• Be aware of the cultural and temporal/historical distance between you and the biblical writers. Though God is eternal, the human authors were not, and didn't write to you specifically.
• Be also aware that the collection of canonical books in the Bible work together to tell a story about God working in history. More detail down below.
• When reading individual sentences, look for repeated words, contrasts, comparisons, lists, cause-effect phrasing, figures of speech, conjunctions, verbs, and pronouns. (It helps if the translation is current and accurate enough to more closely approximate the meanings into your reading language.)
• When reading individual paragraphs, look for general and specific statements, questions and answers, dialogue, purpose/result statements, means (of accomplishment), conditional clauses, people's and God's actions and roles, emotional terms, and tone.
• When reading discourses (longer passages), look for connections between paragraphs and episodes, shifts in the story (breaks/pivots), interchange (comparing 2 stories simultaneously), chiasm (a-b-c-d-c-b-a is a complex one), and inclusio (same/similar words or ideas bookending the passage).
• Be aware of the genre of the text or book, and its implications.
• Types of context include historical-cultural, your own culture(s) including presuppositions, and literary.
• Types of word-study fallacies to avoid include 
• English-only (go back to the Hebrew or Greek!)
• Root (assuming that etymology = real meaning)
• Time-frame (reading a current connotation of a word back into its original text)
• Overload (packing too many ideas into one word)
• Word-count (assuming identical meaning in each location of the word)
• Word-concept (one word = a whole concept), and
• Selective-evidence (cherry-picking the evidence for our interpretation).

Historical Documents

I can summarize this section by the common phrase "Those who don't know the past are doomed to repeat it." Or misinterpret it. Essentially, although some theological traditions eschew attention to the historical context of biblical texts while claiming that they are in fact reading for context, a historical lens is indispensable. An example of historical context being ignored in favor of reading one's own tradition's presuppositions/worldview into the text is this 2021 reprint of a 2018 blog post from a Reformed perspective that either correctly or wildly incorrectly summarizes some of N. T. Wright's key claims about Paul's theology, despite including many quotes from Wright's books (more detail in section below). The post showed how it's definitely possible, and highly likely, to misinterpret an author's meaning if some criteria are not met:

• Recognizes and acknowledges one's own biases and presuppositions
• Recognizes and acknowledges the author's environment (geographical, historical, societal, etc.), then tries to enter the mind of the author
• Holds all historical texts (those inside and outside one's own tradition) to the same standard, rather than raising the standard for the ones outside and lowering the standard for the ones inside
• Reads the entire document and, if possible, additional documents/footnotes (others' testimony and scholarship--preview for History and Eschatology post) that help in understanding by bridging the knowledge-history gap between author and reader

I plan to do at least one additional post specifically devoted to this topic, so that's all this subsection has!

Why is N. T. Wright so Often Misunderstood?

The fact of Wright having been so easily misunderstood by people from various perspectives is well-documented. Prominently, R. C. Sproul publicly called him a heretic based on a misunderstanding of his (orthodox) view of justification by faith. John MacArthur also accused him of a heterodox view of the Atonement (whereas Lutherans take Wright's view as well, and I happen to think that they're fairly orthodox). Given the amount of cognitive effort and intellectual humility that I hope the previous section has shown as necessary to a proper understanding of a historical/biblical text, it is perhaps not surprising that Wright's complex ideas don't fit every reader's worldview or presuppositions.

His Approach

Wright's approach flows from his background. Oxford-trained in philosophy and theology, he taught New Testament studies for two decades at various UK and Canadian universities, served as the middle-Anglican Bishop of Durham, and has written over 80 books in his area of interest and expertise, the historical Jesus (focusing on the Resurrection). His second main focus topic is the New Perspective on Paul.

You already know that Husband has read many of Wright's works. I asked him to summarize Wright's approach to scripture in an elevator speech. Here's the gist of what he said (very well put by another writer as well--the long read is worth your time!):

• Many interpreters translate the Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic into their own language, then interpret from that language. Wright interprets directly from the original language, then translates.
• Since he is committed to examining and thinking about the Scriptures themselves, as their original authors would have intended to communicate messages within their own historical contexts, he ends up critiquing points from nearly all Christian theological traditions.
• He also refuses to align to a polarized position from any one Christian tradition, even his own. (Side note: Anglicanism, in some parts, is commonly referred to as "three-streams" because of its blending of Protestant, Pentecostal, and Catholic.)
• Finally, he notes that there are many ways to read a text "literally" (in the Lutheran take of sensus literalis, or according to the letter/original intent). How would the intended audience have interpreted the text?

A not-exactly-positive, but still fairly accurate, article lists some of Wright's positions that flow from this approach in some more depth.

His Bibliography

I had a difficult time finding a complete list of every single one of his books, because he keeps on writing them. (He started writing decades ago, and is continuing to write busily at age 75ish.) Goodreads lists a selection, including these:

• Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
• Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters
• How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
• God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath
• After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters
• Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today
• The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus' Crucifixion
• Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues
• The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology

Case in Point

I mentioned a reprinted blog post above. The organization reprinting the post is a self-described publisher of texts that clearly describe "historic biblical Christianity" from a specifically Puritan perspective, inspired by some early Methodists. The first problem is that the publisher views "historical" as equivalent to "when the Reformation occurred." Different traditions disagree on when exactly that was, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

At any rate, this post centers on a Wright chapter in one of John Walton's books, titled "Paul's Use of Adam is More Interested in the Effect of Sin on the Cosmos Than in the Effect of Sin on Humanity and Has Nothing to Say About Human Origins." My thoughts by no means constitute a complete analysis, but I have brief responses to each of the post's claims:

• Claim #1: Wright has a low view of Scripture.
• Response: The author's understanding of a "low view" seems to be anything less than divine dictation to the human authors. This also brings in issues of the canon--Reformed groups in general have major problems with the concept of antilegoumena including 2 Peter and Hebrews.
• Claim #2: Wright doesn't call himself an inerrantist. 
• Response: Correct. An inerrantist position, strongly stated, comes across as a literalist who discounts how biblical authors might have communicated their message in their historical context. See section above on Wright's approach.
• Claim #3: Wright thinks the debate over Adam's historicity is more of a focus in the US than in the UK.
• Response: Probably right. Just because a researcher/academic isn't part of a cultural or ethnic group, though, most certainly does not mean that the academic can't show interest and insight in goings-on of that "other" group. It happens all the time, and interest in the "other" is a key part of curiosity that leads to discovery.
• Claim #4: Wright re-imagines and re-interprets Paul.
• Response: Correct. The author phrases this as a criticism by standing behind a shield claiming that her theological tradition has a/the "purely biblical" view without acknowledging the philosophical presuppositions of that tradition that are sometimes prioritized over "biblical" interpretation. See section above.
• Claim #5: Wright overemphasizes the cosmos' redemption (renewal of the creation) over and above individual humans' salvation (from "moral failures").
• Response: Partially correct. The comparative overemphasis is needed, Wright says, because of how the Reformation and other events have produced major shifts in thinking about salvation which need re-examination.
• Claim #6: Wright thinks that Adam being a historical figure is unnecessary to Paul's theology. 
• Response: Correct. However, note that Wright is not saying in those sections that Adam isn't a historical figure. See claim 3.
• Claim #7: Based on all this, Wright doesn't view Scripture by itself. "Either Scripture will be the lens through which you view the world or the world (science, politics, worldview, etc.) will be the lens through which you view Scripture. Ultimately one or the other will be your authority."
• Response: Correct. But I believe that Wright is taking the correct view, as opposed to this view influenced by the myth of perfect objectivity. Because the Bible was not written to us, and everyone brings presuppositions to a text, worldview always comes into play when one is reading Scripture or any other writing.

Now that I've stirred the pot, what are your thoughts?