Three Thoughts on the Bible

In the last 2 days, I have had three converging ideas from three different sources. The big-picture point is about the bible, I think. On their own, they stem off from one big stream, or perhaps, they merge from three different streams. Either way, there is much to think about.

First, the sources:

1) Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America - Stanley Hauerwas

2) Passion and Perspective: Two Dimensions of Education in the Bible - Walter Brueggemann

3) Dear RLP - Real Live Preacher

From Hauerwas' Unleashing the Scripture, Part I: The Politics of the Bible: Sola Scriptura as Heresy?, Chapter 1: Taking the Bible Away from North American Christians. (What great titles!)

"Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian Maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.

North American Christians are trained to believe that they are capable of reading the Bible without spiritual and moral transformation. They read the Bible not as Christians, not as a people set apart, but as democratic citizens who think their "common sense" is sufficient for "understanding" the Scripture. They feel no need to stand under the authority of a truthful community to be told how to read. Instead they assume that they have all the "religious experience" necessary to know what the Bible is about. As a result the Bible inherently becomes the ideology for a politics quite different from the politics of the Church."

Now number 2, from a Brueggemann article:

"Perhaps the primary issue in education, in relation to the Bible, is to break the grip on church education which tends to be privatistic, idealist, and spiritual. The crucial question before us is whether, for the difficult decades to come, we shall have men and women in public life who have a passion for justice and a perspective of mystery, awe, and amazement.

IN 1918, Max Weber made the following statement: "Politics is a strong slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth-that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible." There are clues here for understanding important dimensions of education, biblically understood.

Education in ancient Israel is education in a quite concrete passion. Education consists in the older generation communicating its concrete passions to the younger generation and, hopefully, having that younger generation appropriate them with zeal and imagination.

The texts that mark the beginning point of our discussion (Ex. 12:26, 13:8, 13:14; Deut. 6:20-21; Josh. 4:6, 21) are those that show the parents inculcating the young into what is foundational for the community. In one form or another, all of these texts anticipate a time to come when there will be learning readiness and the child will ask the questions of the community: What does it mean to be Israel? Why do we live the way we live and do what we do? The answer, in various castings, is to tell the story of this community, the long deep memory which started with nobodies who were surprised by transformation and became a community through the historical process (cf. Deut. 10:22). This community has a distinct identity that is in considerable tension with the values and the presuppositions of the dominant community. That distinct identity is the primary subject matter of education in passion.

Education in passion, in the Bible, is nurture into a distinct community that knows itself to be at odds with dominant assumptions. Torah education is an insistence on being fully covenanted Israel who has been chosen, summoned, commanded, and promised. This nurture in passion is concrete and specific, as indeed passion must always be. While Torah acknowledges that "others" are there and struggles with how Israel is to relate to and be understood in the midst of the others (cf. Gen. 12:1-3; Deut. 7:6-11, 23:3-8), it is nurture in particularity that is the main focus, a nurture that produces adults who know so well who they are and what is commanded that they value and celebrate their oddity in the face of every seductive and powerful imperial alternative."

OK, and now number 3 from Real Live Preacher:

Dear RLP,

I have been really confused lately, so I wanted to see if you can help me out at all. This may be a really big question, but why is the Bible important? I am a Christian, and I have heard other Christians say that the Bible is God's word, but I don't know how they are so sure of this. Other Christians say that the Bible is inerrant, which I can't accept just based on my own reading of it.

So here is the problem. How can anyone know that the Bible is divinely inspired? And if it's not, then why does it have any authority? I'm really confused about this.

Andrew

Excerpts of RLP's response:

"If I understand you correctly, you'd like to know why Christians think the Bible is inspired by God and therefore authoritative for Christian life. You would like to know how people came to believe that the teachings in the Bible have a connection to the will and desire of God....

As for me, I know that an ancient tradition and many testimonies of human experience stand behind the New Testament. These are the writings that have nurtured our mothers and fathers in faith across the ages. For that reason alone, I have deep respect for the Bible. My own careful study of the gospels over the years leaves me continually astounded by their depth and by the way they continue to speak powerfully to people of all cultures, all ages, and all levels of education. So I join myself with the larger Christian community in affirming these writings as scripture and using them to guide my life. The New Testament provides me with a baseline or measurement that keeps my own spiritual journey connected to the original teachings of Jesus and his friends.

My trust in the New Testament is an act of faith on my part. It is my own offering to a movement that stretches back to Jesus himself. I faithfully offer my life and belief with a full knowledge of what I am doing and why I am doing it."

OK, sorry for the long quotes...

How do we reconcile these three things? I posted a while back about my thoughts on 'inerrancy', and you can read those here. That was in response to several conversations I had overheard (read: eavesdropping) and was getting pretty frustrated with both the tone of the questions and the responses. Now the Bible is back and I think these guys raise some really interesting questions ands points.

What is the Bible for us--the church--and how on earth do we 'use' it? How are we supposed to read it?

I think the answer to that is we must be taught how to read it; we must be shown how to 'use' it.

Maybe that isn't always the answer, but in this culture, with the mindset that we tend to have, I think it is essential. I don't think I'm ready to be interpreting scripture, but there are some key ideas that have helped me see what is going on in the Bible. Themes such as Kingdom, creation, fall, redemption, community, covenant, etc.--which were all taught to me--have helped shape my worldview and given me a new lens in which to read the Bible.

Its absurd to think that we can open the Bible, read it and understand what is going on apart from the community that the Bible has shaped. To think that we can begin to understand God apart from the People whom God has trusted his identity to doesn't make much sense to me. What we get, as many before have noted, the Bible becomes a tool for us to justify our current lives. It becomes an authority for the status quo which, I believe, it was meant to constantly destroy.

Brueggemann makes an interesting point here about education in ancient Israel: Education consists in the older generation communicating its concrete passions to the younger generation and, hopefully, having that younger generation appropriate them with zeal and imagination. My friends and I talk about the lack of this truth in our Churches today. There is such a division between the older members and the young. And there tend to be no 18-35 year olds in churches with active youth and rich adults. You find the 18-35 year olds at emerging churches or mega churches where they can join a singles group, or a young married couples group, or a young parents group--whatever group happens to meet their description at the time.

This seems to cause a division in the church. The old are no longer involved in the lives of the young. The adults who have struggled with meaning and purpose, love and hate, worked through hard relationships, seen war, been in war...they have no connection to the young people who are struggling to come to terms with their identity, what is meaningful, what does it mean to love, etc. The college kids have no connection to the high school kids. The 20-somethings have no connection to the college kids. Wisdom becomes exclusive to whatever group you happen to be in.

How then does the older generation teach the younger generation? I'm not really sure. I think that it probably involves the creation of a community that doesn't look the rest of the world, to start. And then maybe something like this could be said: This book that we order our lives around, the Bible, it is not like other books. It is the story of the people of God, people like us, through history. This book is not easy to understand and although most people seem to think otherwise, you are not ready to read it on your own yet. But we will teach you to read it. We will give you the tools to be able to understand it and the world around you so that you can continue the stories in your own lives as we have in ours.

Lastly, there are so many people who have questions about the authority of Scripture, or the inerrancy of the Bible...I wonder if those exist because there is a community, namely the church, that does not have any authority in people's lives (for many reasons, probably) and then that community goes around saying things like this about the Bible. Why should anyone care and why should it make sense? It can't make sense apart from a community that actually believes it and lives it out.

This blog is too long, so I'll end it here. I should have let the texts speak for themselves...oh well. A few questions that I'm left to wrestle with:

1) How does the church equip its members to read the Bible?
2) How does the church exercise authority over the lives of the members?
3) What does 'authority' look like, subversively speaking, in this power-suspicious culture?
4) How do we help create new, good habits for Christians in the chespeciallycially in terms of reading the Bible and interpreting it?
5) How do we create a community in which the older generation is teaching the younger? How might this change youth ministry?

Perhaps the primary issue in education, in relation to the Bible, is to break the grip on church education which tends to be privatistic, idealistic, and spiritual. The crucial question before us is whether, for the difficult decades to come, we shall have men and women in public life who have a passion for justice and a perspective of mystery, awe, and amazement. Without such passion and perspective, we are left with the worst forms of pragmatism, technical reason, and utilitarianism which uncritically practice self-interest of a brutal kind. Israel's alternative education insists that life in this world requires glad obedience to the coming Kingdom in which the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news preached to them (Luke 7:22). Without this education in passionate impossibility, the blind, lame, lepers, dead, and poor go unnoticed, and all the others are fated then to live in anxiety and despair until we destroy each other. Without this education in a perspective on the possible, there will be no concrete context for the impossible. (Brueggemann)