I know at some point I'm going to run out of easy titles for these blogs. But until then I'll keep making them simple. I may have to have sequels later on.
I made a decision when I started to learn to read in 1970 that I would not put a book down until I had read it all, in spite of how bad I thought it was as I read it. I didn't make it a vow and I haven't stuck to it religiously over the years.
The book I just finished reading was in danger of being one of those exceptions. It is Paul:The Mind of the Apostle by A N Wilson, published in 1997. I don't know how long it has been on my shelves. I got it from my former pastor who I knew during my teen years. He gave it to me before he died when we visited him in NC some years ago. I got desperate to have something to read and I pulled it off the shelf. I had tried to read it once before and even during the reading this time I toyed with the decision to throw it in the trash when I finished reading it. I wasn't even going to send it to Goodwill.
But I stuck with it and had some interesting insights. I was trained in seminary with the historical critical method of Scripture study. It has caused much gray hair in the fundamentalist camps and even some of the more conservative evangelical camps. There seemed too much in the Scriptures that was questioned by this method. I remember sitting in the library at school, pondering the research I had done on a passage and then having a spiritual insight to the meaning that was connecting with my heart. Those insights were "Aha" moments and were thrilling to me in the midst of all the reading of theological books.
This latest book on Paul had me judging the writer for his lack of furvency toward the Scriptures. He was questioning too much of the authenticity of what has been handed down to us over the years--the authorships, the authenticity of the books as we have them now. I had a similar insight recently when hearing a talk on the Apocrapha. How do we know what is inspired Scripture and what is not? How can we be sure that those who have gone before us have judged righteously in what we have as Holy Scripture today?
I certainly won't solve that theological dilemma in this short blog. But my conclusion after reading this book and hearing other things over the years remains the same. That is, that if we are going to understand what the Spirit of God is doing today in a world that is 2000 years removed from the time of Christ we have to rely on the Holy Spirit to give us guidance. We can't take the written word, seen through the eyes of a 2011 understanding and expect it to hold fast. We can not expect the documents that were inspired by the Holy Spirit then to have the same scientific validity as something that is written today. We can't use the same grid to understand them. We don't live in the Middle East, for one thing.
One of the things I learned is that language usage changes approximately every 30 years. If the Scriptures had been passed to us in English over 2000 years there would be problems understanding them. Multiple that by the fact that we have them in Greek...that was used over 2000 years ago. Not the same Greek you would hear spoken at your nearby gyro shop.
That sounds heritical, doesn't it? But how can we expect the writings that we have in our Holy Scriptures to be viewed with a microscope of scientific accuracy if we don't have the original documents that were written by the authors? How can we hold for absolute accuracy the messages that have been passed down to us if we can't verify the context of when they were written?
How will anyone for that matter be able to understand what God is doing in our day and time 50 or 100 years from now? Will any one author be able to capture all the variations of experiences we all are having in our relationship to Christ in our individual communities? Let alone in our state, in the United States or even anywhere else in the world?
Let me say it bluntly...we are not able to take the Bible and make it a book of facts like a Policies and Procedures Manual where everything is lined out in black and white. We must be people of a Living Word. We must be living in a vibrant relationship with Christ daily for us to be able to interpret what is the Godly thing for us to be doing. The Scriptures can be a guide but they don't speak of twittering, texting, IM, gigs or RAM and I don't believe we should expect them to.
So how do we live in that moment by moment relationship? The same way we live in relationship with anyone else. That's a problem because some of us don't know how to live in relationship with someone else. We don't understand intimacy. We don't know how to connect on the deepest levels of our heart.
But for sure in order to develop that type of relationship we need to spend time with someone. We need to listen carefully. We need to clarify what we think we are hearing. And we need to listen unconditionally so that the speaker can say what they need to say without getting a judgemental response from us...a shaming response.
If we are going to be people of the Word, we need to be people of the Living Word. What is Jesus saying to us today about how we are to live his life among those we find ourselves living? Can your local pastor or the radio preacher or the Pope be the only one interpretting what God is saying? Or where is our responsibility as followers of Christ to be in communion with him on a daily basis? Does it matter what God is saying to us and not just to others? Do we always take everything second hand from someone else?
I want to know Christ today as the Living Word and not sit back comfortably expecting others to have his word for me today. It would be a lot easier to sit back and let someone else do the work for me in my life following after Christ but I'm going to take the hard road. I hope you will join me, because I can't do it alone.
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