The Hunt for Red October as Applied to Modern Biblical Literary Theory

I just read Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October while we were staying at the house for a month in Seattle.

I’m not really a fan of Clancy, but it was sitting on a book shelf in the house so I picked it up.  I’ve seen the movie, I knew the story and I like to think about Sean Connery… does that sound gay?

30 days later I finally finished it.  I’m a slow reader.  I thought I would get a lot of reading done in the house, but those 470 pages were it.

When I started my job at NBC in February of 2007 I had to go to Richmond, Virginia for orientation.  At the airport I picked up a John Grisham book, The Chamber, because it was either that or something from Oprah’s book club.

Over the course of the orientation week I nearly finished that 500 page novel.

That’s when I started thinking about reading the bible.  It’s only about 1,000 pages and I’d never read it.  I could read 500 pages of pop-fiction in a week, but I had never bothered to read the bible straight through, not even once.

So I did it.  It took me about 2 months.  I started with Genesis and read straight through to Revelation.

I’d probably read the whole thing in bits and pieces before, but never as a whole work.  It made me feel good to know that I had, without a doubt, read the entire book that I said my religious beliefs were based on.  I didn’t have to bluff as much anymore.

That’s when I started questioning popular organized Christianity.  After I had read the bible I couldn’t help but feel like what I had just read and what I was seeing didn’t match up very well.

What I was seeing at church and volunteer functions seemed like a poorly assembled scale model of the church in the book of Acts.  Jesus’ message is so simple, but somehow we’ve made it so complex.

Some elements of modern Christianity have become the Hollywood movie version of the book.  The same guys win, and most of the characters are there, but many are missing out on so much of the simplicity and freedom of Jesus’ message.

There’s something to be said for pulling pieces of the bible apart for greater study, but it was constructed as a single literary work.  It’s worth it to, at least once, apply our time to a single linear reading of the bible.

With the amount of fiction reading that I’m capable of, it only seemed logical to read the bible once.

Besides, you can imagine old Sean Connery playing the part of Moses, and young Sean Connery as Peter (who everyone knows had a Scottish accent).

Comments

Good post.

Buuuuuttt...I have to say that if The Hunt for Red October went page after page explaining the lineage of Jack Ryan, I’d think it was boring as hell too.

How was Casa Bonita?  Heh heh...stomach recovering?  Don’t say you weren’t warned.  Jack and Carol are very cool tho, I hope you had a good time with them.