From testimony to handbook

Somewhere along the way we Western "civilized" Bible-readers started interpreting the Bible as if it were a handbook, punctuated by stories.  If you read the Bible as a handbook, you go to where all the "rules" are and then order your life to obey them. The stories may be nice examples, where so-and-so did thus-and-such, and then was either praised or damned for it.
But no one in Western culture read the Bible that way before the "Enlightenment" in Europe. Before that, people read the Bible as testimony, telling the long story of God with people and people with God. What happened? Why did we switch our attitudes (or shift our paradigm)?
Those of us with Christian ancestors had a long tradition of looking at sacred texts, taught to us by our Jewish fore-bearers. They knew that sacred texts are collections of literature with a peculiar ability to "say" things in a profound way as long as people read them together, argued about their meanings and then re-interpreted them in connection with their current lived realities. We used to read the Bible for clues to the adventure of God with humans, not as a handbook of certainties, frozen for all time.
The Enlightenment in Europe did a number on Biblical interpretation.  All of a sudden, no texts were valuable that weren't also "scientific" or "historical." What makes for authority got a thorough makeover. If something wasn't "provable" using current scientific or historical methods of understanding, it wasn't true or reliable.
In a misguided attempt to prove our worth, our Bible-reading communities latched on to the "scientific" and "historical" methods and attempted to fit Bible reading and Bible texts into those paradigms.  It was a bad fit. We're still paying the price. We still want to read the Bible as if it were a timeless handbook for life, showing us where the rules are and spelling out the consequences for breaking them, and that this method is proper because the Bible is "historical" and "scientific." The results have been disastrous.
Let me scream here--NO!!!
Christian brothers and sisters, let's get back to reading the Bible as testimony--that is, the stories of our past, through the collections of writings we have inherited from the communities who have brought us here. They are peculiar stories, with a peculiar ability to tell us about ourselves and who we are in God's eyes. (They even might explain what is meant by that odd phrase--"in God's eyes.") That "peculiar ability" we used to call "the inspiration of the Holy Spirit." It's not a bad term.

Bring your best...

Lent is a strange season, one that seems to go by without being acknowledged by anyone who isn't a church geek. Still, the Lent traditions, including the disciplined reading of holy texts together, are  ancient practices, that put our little-church-with-a-big-mission squarely in the deep history of the mission of Jesus. Bible study is an art form, one we need to keep keen and practiced. There is so much out there that is sloppy, trite, and unhelpful.

Fewer and fewer people are even aware of how much our modern world is letting go of this practice. Let's do better, church geeks.

When people actually read the bible together...

...no telling what can happen! People might actually encounter what Jesus is saying to us, in ways that empower people to break free from every enslaving force of the culture. "I didn't know that Christians believe THAT!" Where have you been, people?  There are precious few places where serious (read "intelligent") bible study is going on.  Some local churches are taking up the challenge.

In promoting biblical literacy, I know that I'm being counter cultural. Not too many people these days actually study the bible.  Lots seem to think they do, or at least they can quote it when it suits them.  That's not the same thing.

At our "little church with a big mission" we'll begin reading on Thursday a little new testament book, the "letter" of First John, with lots of questions.  Why did the early Christians consider this so important?  What's the issue being addressed by they author? Does it have anything to do with the 21st Century?
Our age suffers from not just biblical illiteracy, but the view that nothing can be learned from the struggles of our ancestors. Past ages were so different from ours that they are now irrelevant, the thinking goes. It's a kind of snobbery.
I'm so excited when folks begin to let their guard down and just read the Bible for its own sake--no agenda, no pressure--just a lot of ways to encounter an expanded way of living.  The Christian heritage, going back to Jesus' own self, has unique and precious things to say to the world. It would be a crime for Christians to forget that.
Let's go, Thursday-nighters!  7:30pm, same place.

Radical Inclusiveness in Ephesians

The letter to the Ephesians was written in the first century after Jesus, after his death, but before most of the Gospels were written.  The most important issue confronting the small groups of Jesus-followers was how to be a mixed group of Jews and Gentiles. How can there be one group of people made up of two groups of people who have built their respective identities on NOT being like each other? Paul or not, the writer was most concerned about this new community of people who were called to be ONE where they had been TWO before.  The writer was most convinced that Gentiles didn't have to give up being Gentiles and Jews didn't have to give up being Jews in order for them to live together in peace.  Somehow (maybe mysteriously!) Jesus made that possible.

Reading Ephesians again in the 21st century, I'm wondering how it addresses us.  Could it be that the categories of Jew-Gentile are recreated in our own differences, religious and otherwise?  So many of us build our identities on NOT being like THOSE people--those kinds of Christians, those Muslims, those Southerners, those Yankees, those Republicans, those Democrats.  What would we have to do differently to break down the barriers that still divide us?
I'm reminded of an old joke. "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't."
Lord, save us from ourselves!

Prayer Time

First century Christians have different prayer habits and language from the Christians of the 21st century.  It's often hard to penetrate the prayer language of the New Testament--difficult but not impossible.  After all, Christians read the bible now--in translations to English and thousands of other world languages--and still find it relevant.
The letter to the Ephesians assumes that the hearers and readers are familiar with the prayer language of the Jewish synagogue. The standard form of prayer--in Hebrew beracot, or blessing--opens the letter-writer's body of writing in Chapter 1: "Blessed be God..." 
Why does this form of prayer sound alien to Christians of the 21st century? It's not often that Christian prayer language includes a formula to "bless God" even though this is a familiar formula for the prayers of Jews. Does it seem too presumptuous for human beings to "bless God?"  After all, God is the source of all blessings.  Why would such a God "stoop" to being blessed by humans?
Indeed!
Humility is the very characteristic of God that invites imitation. On this day, as the very humble Bishop of Rome is visiting Washington DC, may Christians everywhere remember to "bless God" for God's amazing grace at stooping to the level of humanity.

Reading and Being Read/Feeding and Being Fed

In the life of the church, the Bible has a particular place.  Allen Verhey and Joseph Harvard write about scripture as both "scripted" and "script." [Ephesians, in the Belief series, a Theological Commentary on the Bible, WJK, 2011] The Bible is part of feedback loop in the life of the church. (read about another church feedback loop in my comments at PastorBethatCovenant.) That is, the Bible is written, a text object to be studied, a scripted thing.  But it is not just that. The bible is also script, a text to be performed in the life of the church.  We perform the text when we read and listen to it in worship, when we live lives in obedient service to its demands. Performing the text in worship and prayer and service, the text becomes a mechanism for re-forming our lives, which we then re-perform in God's grace, and are by God's grace, transformed, both as individuals and as a community. Feedback loop.  Fed people. New people.
That's why I love reading scripture.  I need feeding, real, spiritual food.

Bible Study? You've got to be kidding!

I'm a bible geek, I admit it. Ever since I found out that it's possible to love God with one's mind (and be loved by God with the experiences of spiritual insight) I love reading the Bible.  And particularly, I love reading it with other people.  On Wednesday mornings a group of pastors in my town meet for mutual encouragement and prayer.  We start out with "a word from the Word" where we take turns sharing what we've been studying from the bible recently.  It's the most amazing thing!  Words from scripture become God's Word to us, as we reflect on what we've read, and how those words from the Word have touched us.  Those words both comfort and challenge us as pastors, and drive us to articulate what it is we've heard, for the building up of each other.
It's probably useless to moan and groan about the level of biblical illiteracy these days.  When too many people use the Bible to do such awful things (shaming, being the most reprehensible on my list) it's easy to let serious Bible study fall away.  Still, somebody has to do serious reading and listening. "But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?" [Romans 10:14]  It's a good thing I love to do this, since that's what I'm called to do.
Watch this space for upcoming comments about the next study series on the book of Ephesians:  the unity of the church--What's at stake?