Seeing a Text

What could you do to visualize what a text is about? There must be dozens of ways to create art from scripture. Here are a few ways that students have used in my classes or that I have participated in as part of other people's classes.

Posters

In classes on the Pauline letters, I ask students for a poster arguing a thesis about some portion of Paul's letters. The poster is not merely a collage of magazine pictures or lots of words typed in a large font and pasted onto poster board. It is to argue a thesis but to do so using pictures and words.

Preparing a Poster: You Need A Topic and a Thesis

To choose a topic, think about what you have discovered or wanted to know more about during the first two weeks of class. You might build your poster on a topic like this:

• Resources in 1 Corinthians for teen discussions of sex.
• The worship wars of 1 Cor. 11.
• Love, Love, Love: The vision of 1 Cor. 13.
• Paul before and after the Damascus road.
• What Paul knows about Jesus.
• What Luke (the author of Acts) knows about Paul.
• Paul reads the Old Testament.

Each of these examples is a topic. You change a topic into a thesis by making an argument for a particular conclusion about that topic. Here are examples of possible thesis statements related to a couple of the topics above.

• Paul's statement that "your bodies are a temple" gives teens an honor that will strengthen them against the temptation to believe that sexualized relationships are their only source of self-esteem.
• 1 Corinthians 13 offers a vision for congregational life, not just a poetic reading at weddings.

My use of posters in class was inspired by an article by Patricia O'Connell Killen, "Making thinking real enough to make it better: using posters to develop skills for constructing disciplinary arguments," Teaching Theology and Religion 5 (2002) 221-26.

Four D's of Poster-Creation

(These work for sermon-creation too.)

Discovery

As you read a text, what have you discovered? What was something new that you would like to follow up on, or an old insight that you want to know more about? Decide on a topic.

Development

In the poster session context, development means two things.

Develop a Thesis

First, dive into your topic. Spend some time with print and online resources. Get help from your favorite librarian. Take notes, gather ideas, do some sleuthing. Then decide what argument your poster will make. This is important. Your poster will not just gather data and resource material. It will argue a thesis about your topic. Your poster is not just a collection of stuff. It represents an idea that you are presenting and supporting.

Develop Resources

Your poster may include outlines, ideas, words & pictures, physical objects—anything you need to reach your audience and make your idea clear and compelling. Gather and create the resources you need.

Design

Just as you cannot say everything at once in a sermon, but instead you weave together materials throughout a presentation over time, so also the poster requires attention to design. How will you gather and present your materials in the space available to you? How does your design either support or detract from the clarity of your idea and its persuasiveness? This is the scissors, glue and tape phase of the poster assignment.

Delivery

A sermon is not finished until it is delivered. Likewise, your poster session assignment concludes with time spent talking to others about the argument you have presented visually. When we do this assignment in class, we take time to walk around the poster displays and hear from one another about the work prepared. Each poster should make sense even if the designer is not standing beside it with words of explanation. Even so, classmates have a chance to ask and answer questions of one another during the poster session.

Write, and/or Record a Documentary

Often we hear or say in gospels classes, "Well no one was standing there with a video camera going," as if to say that had Jesus arrived on the scene when video was available, we would not have so many embarrassing discrepancies in four canonical accounts of his life. Here is your chance to "capture on film" some biblical story, or to produce a documentary offering a reporter's view of an event from the New Testament. When you do this, you will be attending to questions like these:

1. What medium am I working in (print, radio, television, film)?
2. What is my angle on the story? What do I think happened?
3. What will I keep in, what will I leave out, and what will I make up to tell the story?
4. What will I do to keep the interest of my audience?
5. How will my work combine reporting of the events and analysis of them?

Bibliodrama

Bibliodrama, sometimes called a form of modern midrash, is an imaginative telling of a biblical story in a group for which a dramatist (or interviewer) gets help from the group to tell the story. It shares certain conventions and techniques with the Psychodrama developed by Jacob and Zerka Moreno, and it needs a trained interviewer who works with a group to explore the gaps in biblical narrative and the feelings, actions and motivations of biblical characters.

Peter Pitzele's book, Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama (Los Angeles: Alef Design Group, 1997) offers two ways to do bibliodrama (a short form and a long form). If you are interested in learning more, pick up the book and/or visit Peter's website for information on his calendar and on in-depth training sessions. Luther Seminary students may attend his Kairos workshops at a reduced rate.

Visual Art, Music, Poetry

Imagine designing a stained glass window on the theme of your text, drawing your text, or writing lyrics and a hymn tune. Any of these qualify as "something creative."

My favorite far-out appropriation of a biblical text in a creative way is the sermon, Love Song for the Vineyard, preached on Isaiah 5 by my Luther Seminary colleague, Dr. Frederick J. Gaiser. (The link here is to a Windows Media file video of the chapel service where this sermon was preached. The service begins about 5 minutes into the tape.) While you might never compose a really good sermon all of which can be sung to the tune of "Home, Home on the Range" (I know I haven't yet), Fred's work can inspire the imagination toward equally creative and faithful work with a text.

Another options with music is to look through your hymnal or songbook for ways that your text has been sung by Christians. What have the hymnwriters seen in the text? How do text and music combine to communicate their discoveries?

Next: Find problems you can be creative with on the Activity Grid.