lamppost or illumination?
Comments from a recent post by Real Live Preacher, Thereí³ Something About the Way You Use the Bible
- “What if the Bible is intended not merely to tell you what to think, but how to think? In that case, the questions the Bible raises in your mind may be more important than the answers you find in it. Ever notice, when Jesus was asked a question, how often he answered with another question? What if God’s answers to us are often questions? And what if, by inspiring questions in us, the Bible actually read us, instead of us reading it?” — Brian McLaren from Adventures in Missing the Point, page 81
I own the Tanakh, an English translation of the Koran, various Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, and many other religous texts.
However, I don’t own a Christian Bible. Mainly for the reasons that you talk about… the bludgeoning, the piercing, the thudding catterwalling of those “one verse wonders”.
…as Luther said:
“Sin bravely.”
I’d agree with this definitely. Just finished reading A New Kind of Christian by the same author and I agreed with most of what he had to say about the way we approach the Bible and the Christian life.
I enjoyed new kind of Christian but I’m a little cautious with anything that is a radical departure from historic Christianity. I believe that we are not to disect the Bible but instead have it read us but it does state things about reality. Even Jesus’ questions revealed what Jesus thought about things. He was intending to teach something, he wanted people to work for it and really understand it. The whole Bible is not a parable, it is true story written in many different genres that are all approached in unique ways.
I like part of what he is saying but the reality is that the authors of the books of the Bible and God were all trying to communicate something. The object is then to listen to the author’s intention, the meaning of the passage as much as we can. I believe the really difficult question that we are now facing is one of inspiration. How do we believe the Bible to be inspired? I wonder if the real problem of the past has been with a view of “verbal inspiration” of the Bible. This view says that God spoke the words through the authors word by word. Is this reality? How did God actual inspire the scriptures if we find that people’s own language, grammar and viewpoints seem to affect how the message is communicated.
I wonder if McLaren is even asking the right question.
I don’t think that Brian meant that we shouldn’t accept the Bible as historical (because it is) but that we need to change the way in which we approach it. We’ve treated it like a textbook that we can run to for answers to all of life’s problems/issues and if something isn’t directly spoken to we can bend passages to fit. I don’t think that we should do that, and in this I agree with him. Instead of us reading the Bible we need to let it read us. I find that I do this a lot already when I do devotions. I read a passage and try to understand the context and stuff and then try to see the parallels between that time and today. Sometimes the things I learn from reading the Bible aren’t written out word for word but are discovered simply by trying to understand the way situation and God in the situation shaped the person involved. In this I absolutely love the fact that God gave us such flawed heroes to follow because we can learn so much from them.