By Colin Friesen
As long as I can remember, I played video games. An early influence came from my cousin, who always seemed to have the latest and greatest in Nintendo games and consoles. Video games were still important to me, but most of the authority figures in my life considered it a childish pastime I would eventually grow out of. To the dismay of some, I didn’t stop playing. In fact, I became more dedicated as I grew older.
I’ve also been a practicing Christian (of the Mennonite persuasion) for as long as I can remember. In 2014, I graduated from Columbia Bible College with a degree in Biblical Studies with a Teaching Emphasis. I yearned to learn and teach the Bible in academic settings. When my wife and I moved to Waterloo to begin my Masters in Theology at Conrad Grebel, I knew that I wanted to tailor my program for higher academic studies. This meant a thesis, a one hundred page year-long project that represented my original research. I had no idea what I was going to do.
After six months of trying to decide, I strolled into the office of my department head. I sat down to have a frank conversation about the crazy idea I had come up with. You see, there’s a video game called The Binding of Isaac. The title was exactly the same as the traditional Jewish title of the harrowing story in Genesis 22 that most Christians know as Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac. I suggested to my supervisor that my thesis could be about how this video game is actually an interpretation of the biblical story through the video game medium. To my surprise, the department thought it was a great idea. Soon afterward, my research began.
In Biblical Studies, the dominant methodology used by many scholars is “historical criticism.” This method attempts to recreate the original context of the period the text was written in. It’s argued by those scholars that this is the closest we can get to determine what the author meant when they wrote it. That’s what I spent most of my undergrad doing. That’s not at all what I’m doing now.
My thesis research uses a methodology called “reception theory” or “reader-response theory” as it’s used in some fields. If we consider reading the Bible a conversation between writer and reader, then historical criticism favours the writer, and reception theory supports the reader. I’m not necessarily concerned about what the original audience believed, or what the author meant when they wrote it. Instead, I’m interested in how Genesis 22 was interpreted by different people over time. In doing so, I plan to compare Christian and Jewish interpretations with the game’s reading of the text and see what interesting patterns or insights develop.
If you asked me what my biggest take away from this project is, it was this: After surveying critical interpretations over two thousand years of Jewish and Christian traditions, I’ve learned that there has never really been a straightforward reading of the text. Every time a new person approaches the text, they inevitably bring themselves into it, and it appears to change. Different eras, particular theological perspectives, and historical events all have a massive impact on what people come to believe.
I never thought it possible to bridge the gap between video games and biblical studies. When I pitched it to my department, I thought it would get politely rejected. I never thought that my favourite past time could become a part of my spiritual formation. In the same way that video games had taught me to value play even in adulthood, this way of studying scripture was also helping me play with the Bible too. I’ve never been more excited about the potential this brings to my career than I have been studying for this project.