Blessings in the name of the risen Christ.
One of the great challenges of the church today, especially, in America is to break through the limits of a literal approach to the Bible. It is a struggle that has existed throughout much of church history. Even among faith communities that urge a literalistic approach to the Bible they, rarely, mean to take everything literally. Far too often a skepticism about understanding the Bible literally is confused with questioning or challenging the authority of scripture rather than one about how and why the scriptures came about and how they functioned in the lives of the communities that gave birth to those words or formed around those words.
This issue can become divisive and fracture friendships, congregations and denominations. It even impacts how agnostics and atheists approach the possibility of faith and it is most often concepts of literal interpretation and it's weaknesses and failures that the non-believer rejects and/or argues against.
Too often the well-intended saints and faithful of the church attempt to defend the Bible against the skeptic and non-believer by a premature assertion of its authority as the "word of God." But exactly what do they mean by that?
For some it is the concept that the Bible was poured out to Moses in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and similarly, to the other transcribers or sacred stenographers of an oral word poured out across the centuries, including Paul and the New Testament authors. It sees the Bible as a single book with a single author, God. It is perfect in the original languages although for some that seems to mean the King James Authorized Version as if it was authorized by God "himself" and not writen in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Since it comes entirely from God it must contain no errors and any seeming inconsistencies are either the result of poor transmission, poor translation, or the limits of a finite human understanding.
At the opposite extreme is the understanding of the Bible as the archaic texts of primitive cultures that have little pertinent to say to our lives today. The texts are more curiosities than anything else, although the King James Version may still be interesting as a poetic exercise. The possibilities somewhere between these two extremes are too numerous to identify. What is a person or a community of faith supposed to do?
If broken saints are static because of things that we have allowed to hold us captive then a literal understanding of the Bible may well be one of the things keeping us in our clay pot rigidity. In contrast, the Gospel of John relates the believer to a living Word in Jesus Christ. The capital W "Word" was stated as present in the dynamics of creation and again in Jesus death and resurrection. That living Word constantly does the unexpected. It is the antithesis of a fixed, rigid, and permanent literal word, never changing.
So how do we allow this dynamic Word to interact with our lives?
We start by letting go of all of our assumptions about what we know about God's word and Word by reading it again for ourselves, one section and passage at a time. We let go of what we expect to see and instead encounter exactly what is there in front of us, neither adding nor taking away anything. It is as Marcus Borg expresses it Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally. We allow the word to speak to us again as if for the very first time and to hear it as its was spoken to a people for the very first time long, long ago. In the tension between that ancient reading and our present reading we discover things about the word and Word we have never heard. In that nexus we discover a living Word that cracks our captivity and animates our lives, brings us healing, moving us towards wholeness.
Next time: Engaging the Word.
One of the great challenges of the church today, especially, in America is to break through the limits of a literal approach to the Bible. It is a struggle that has existed throughout much of church history. Even among faith communities that urge a literalistic approach to the Bible they, rarely, mean to take everything literally. Far too often a skepticism about understanding the Bible literally is confused with questioning or challenging the authority of scripture rather than one about how and why the scriptures came about and how they functioned in the lives of the communities that gave birth to those words or formed around those words.
This issue can become divisive and fracture friendships, congregations and denominations. It even impacts how agnostics and atheists approach the possibility of faith and it is most often concepts of literal interpretation and it's weaknesses and failures that the non-believer rejects and/or argues against.
Too often the well-intended saints and faithful of the church attempt to defend the Bible against the skeptic and non-believer by a premature assertion of its authority as the "word of God." But exactly what do they mean by that?
For some it is the concept that the Bible was poured out to Moses in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and similarly, to the other transcribers or sacred stenographers of an oral word poured out across the centuries, including Paul and the New Testament authors. It sees the Bible as a single book with a single author, God. It is perfect in the original languages although for some that seems to mean the King James Authorized Version as if it was authorized by God "himself" and not writen in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Since it comes entirely from God it must contain no errors and any seeming inconsistencies are either the result of poor transmission, poor translation, or the limits of a finite human understanding.
At the opposite extreme is the understanding of the Bible as the archaic texts of primitive cultures that have little pertinent to say to our lives today. The texts are more curiosities than anything else, although the King James Version may still be interesting as a poetic exercise. The possibilities somewhere between these two extremes are too numerous to identify. What is a person or a community of faith supposed to do?
If broken saints are static because of things that we have allowed to hold us captive then a literal understanding of the Bible may well be one of the things keeping us in our clay pot rigidity. In contrast, the Gospel of John relates the believer to a living Word in Jesus Christ. The capital W "Word" was stated as present in the dynamics of creation and again in Jesus death and resurrection. That living Word constantly does the unexpected. It is the antithesis of a fixed, rigid, and permanent literal word, never changing.
So how do we allow this dynamic Word to interact with our lives?
We start by letting go of all of our assumptions about what we know about God's word and Word by reading it again for ourselves, one section and passage at a time. We let go of what we expect to see and instead encounter exactly what is there in front of us, neither adding nor taking away anything. It is as Marcus Borg expresses it Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally. We allow the word to speak to us again as if for the very first time and to hear it as its was spoken to a people for the very first time long, long ago. In the tension between that ancient reading and our present reading we discover things about the word and Word we have never heard. In that nexus we discover a living Word that cracks our captivity and animates our lives, brings us healing, moving us towards wholeness.
Next time: Engaging the Word.
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