Recently Hamo had a great post about the Bible. He's reading through the Old Testament and has been struck by the "harsh way God seems to deal with his people." and that "he does seem to punish disproportionate to the offense on several occasions." They are some great thoughts and too often Xns tend to gloss over this kind of stuff. This is what I posted back to him...
At the moment I’m tending see scripture less like the word of God, in the traditional fundamentalist sense, and more like the writings of people who have experienced God. If you don’t believe that God dictated the Bible it means that things are going be coloured sometimes quite heavily by the writers own beliefs and ideas. For me the ultimate revelation of God is not scripture but Jesus. So everything I read I try to interpret it through the lens of Jesus. So looking at my numbers I might say yer they’ve got the whole holiness thing right and the ease at which we can break our relationship with God but perhaps not the whole vindictive strike you down if you sneeze in the wrong direction kind of thing.
3 comments:
Hey Chris,
You've put your finger right into one of my biggest problems as a Christian.
The solution you offer is very tempting. God didn't send the Bible to save us.
Still, I like the evangelical idea of allowing Scripture to judge us rather than us judging Scripture. (Until I try to apply this to much of the OT.) Of course we need to make judgements - I'm not supporting a suspension of reason.
I guess your position might be summed up as judging Scripture by Christ?
Yes, there are different voices in the Bible, but let me digress to make a preliminary point. Somewhere today I read about "discovering a manuscript" - I am not sure if it was in your blog or in a "Read More" link in The Transit Lounge. The method recommended was to have a book of the Bible reproduced on A4 pages without any paragraph breaks or chapter/verse numbers. Read the whole book and, in company, discuss ideas, themes etc that can be detected. I didn't read enough to see if it went on to say, identify contradictions or inconsistencies, but I bet it did. I found this very interesting because it is precisely how the whole field of Biblical scholarship was undertaken. As a result of that endeavour books like Isaiah were seen to be compilations of at least three distinct voices. In the OT as a whole, there are many voices, two of which are rivals: the Deuteronomic tradition and the Priestly tradition. The former is the original Hebrew revelation of God as unconditional love. The latter, developed after the Babylonian exile, was the work of people whose focus was temple culture. It was the Priestly tradition that gave us the angry, punishing god. Abba, the God to whom Jesus bore witness, is of the D tradition. And yes, Jesus is the definitive revelation of God. The Bible is mistreated when a "literal" reading of it is regarded as inerrant revelation. Finally, you mention the ease of breaking our relationship with God - from the point of view of the D tradition that relationship is never broken, because God is permanently faithful to it. That is what makes us holy - not anything we do. It follows that we cannot do anything to break the relationship. We can deny it. We can pretend to be ungodly by wallowing in what we call sin. But God does not let go of us. That is what Jesus revealed about God, and that is the sense in which he saves us. So I really like what you say about interpreting what you read through the lens of Jesus, or, as Nathan says, Judging scripture by Christ. I really enjoy you blog Chris. Go jollily, Paul
Hey Twogreytoes,
Yes Manuscript Discovery is from this blog. There's a link on the side under Articles: Theology.
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