Make sure to add to your reading list The Bible as Improv: Seeing and Living the Script in New Ways by Ron Martoia (March, 2010, Zondervan). Here is an honest, creative, and challenging presentation of good, bad, and inconsistent ways of living in conversation with the Bible. Like Scot McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet, Martoia reflects with consternation on his Christian journey, riddled with selective and sloppy biblical application. His own journey started to take a new direction, however, when he viewed the Bible less as a repository of information, but as a life-shaping resource, a lens or worldview that helps us make sense of everything.
From this transformed perspective, Martoia describes how new metaphors are necessary to help us grasp how the Bible shapes our imaginations and lives. After a brief interaction with David Tracy’s metaphor of the Bible as classic, he dives into a promising interaction with jazz and dramatic improvisation. This is The Bible as Improv at its best, as these metaphors open new possibilities for the role of community, collaboration, and creativity in biblical interpretation and application. In short, Martoia asserts that Christian communities need to be immersed in the Bible as a script, forming creative and communal ways of improvising on this script today. On a practical level, The Bible as Improv presents several methods, including read-throughs and communal dialogue, for allowing the Bible to function as the foundational script for Christian improvisation.
Although improvisation is one of the most promising metaphors for understanding biblical interpretation and Christian living, The Bible as Improv is not without faults. For one, the title itself is a bit misleading, for Martoia present the Bible as script, and Christian living as improv (except for a brief mention that the Bible itself is a record of improvisations). Second, it is hard to reconcile a biblical script with complete improvisational freedom, as Martoia wants to emphasize. If the Bible is a script, is not improvisational freedom constrained in some degree by this script? Is script really the best metaphor, since it implies that we have set lines for living our Christian lives? What are the standards for judging a community’s understanding of the script and their lived improvisations? In this regard, The Bible as Improv would have been strengthened by more interaction with other explorations of this metaphor, such Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics by Samuel Well or The Drama of Doctrine by Kevin Vahoozer, recognizing that others have wrestled with these issues as well. Third, even though I appreciated Martoia’s creative exploration of improvisational metaphors, the books would have been clarified by greater attention to the actual improvisational process, whether in jazz or drama, and how it relates to biblical interpretation and application. For example, how do actors interact with a script in order to improvise on stage? What are the constraints and freedoms inherent in this process? Fourth, I found myself longing for practical examples. The Bible as Improv raises lots of good and unresolved questions (a great place to begin!), but readers will be left to wonder: how do Christian communities actually improvise with faithfulness to the script and communal agreement in areas like women in ministry or giving possessions to the poor?
So in sum, The Bible as Improv is an exciting and creative read, and it convinced me even more than improvisation is one of the most promising metaphors for re-envisioning biblical interpretation and application. But as the book engages your imagination, as I think it will, you will begin to recognize its weaknesses. The Bible as Improv is an interesting foray into Christian living as improvisation, but it will make you eager for more!
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