up, up & up

The Bible contains sixty-six books, in dozens of literary genres, written by nearly as many authors, in multiple languages, over several thousand years. The Bible is not merely a book, but an extensive library capable of conveying wide and brilliant truths. The Bible is like a piano with a vast range of notes and capable of playing an endless array of songs.

For the first 1000 years of the church’s history, believers took for granted that there were literal, historical, analogical, symbolic, mystical, moral, inspirational, cosmological, and eschatological levels of interpretation of the Bible text. Each was true on its own level, but maybe not helpful on the other levels. Nor did one level trump all the others. This became a living and prayerful experience. Presently, we seem to have gone backwards.

I would say that the powerful, revolutionary thing about Jesus’ message is that he says, ‘What do you do with the people that aren’t like you? What do you do with the Other? What do you do with the person that’s hardest to love?’ … That’s the measure of a good religion, is – you can love the people who are just like you; that’s kind of easy. So what Jesus does is takes the question and talks about fruit. He’s interested in what you actually produce. And that’s a different discussion. How do we love the people in the world that are least like us?

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.

The dilemma we’re facing isn’t first and foremost about the clash between horrific portraits of God in Scripture and our moral intuitions. It’s rather about the clash between these portraits and God’s own self-revelation in the crucified Christ. On the cross he reveals his eternal nature to be self-sacrificial, enemy-loving, non-violent love. God is love (1 Jn.4:8), and this love is defined by the cross (1 Jn. 3:16). This love doesn’t seem compatible with God committing himself to mercilessly smashing families together, and that is the core problem. In fact, not only would we expect all material in Scripture to be consistent with what we learn about God in Christ, but on Jesus’ own authority as well as the uniform witness of Church history, all material in Scripture bears witness to Christ (Jn 5:39-45; Lk 24:25-278, 32, 44). It’s not self-evident how a portrait of God committing himself to mercilessly smash families together and causing parents to eat their children bears witness to Christ.

An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, sappy whistler in the dark. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us energy to act and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

Language is just that. It’s language. It’s not the reality, but just the words we use. I think it is important that Jesus uses this phrase often: “the kingdom of God is like.” And the word “parable” means “to place alongside of.” So it is taking language and placing it alongside of something in order to better access it. I think it goes back to this Jesus story being just that, a powerful story rooted in actual space, time, and history. So the people who were telling it and interacting with it and anticipating the coming of Jesus and then working through the implications of the cross and resurrection, they were real people in real places in real time. They put all of this in language that their listeners and readers could understand. So what does it look like for us now to put this in our own language that the world around us can resonate with?

I suggest that the most significant basis for meeting men of different religious traditions is the level of fear and trembling, of humility, of contrition, where our individual moments of faith are mere waves in the endless ocean of mankind’s reaching out for God, where all formulations and articulations appear as understatements, where our souls are swept away by the awareness of the urgency of answering God’s commandment, while stripped of pretension and conceit we sense the tragic insufficiency of human faith.

The goal of human knowing is neither to exalt science over other forms of inquiry nor to use theology as a magic wand to make things we can’t otherwise explain vanish. The goal of human knowing is instead to seek to engage God, the world, and ourselves in one unified frame of meaning.

I would say about individuals, an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I’m not accommodated. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society.

It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.

Do the gatekeepers therefore believe that Christians today must embrace polygamy as a moral, acceptable and sacred form of “biblical family”?
That’s not a tough question for someone like me because I don’t approach the Bible the same way the gatekeepers pretend we must. My hermeneutic — the way I read and interpret the Bible –doesn’t insist that all of its rules and teachings are sacrosanct and authoritative for all of time. My hermeneutic says that the Christward trajectory of the Bible — the long arc bending toward justice and Jubilee — must guide us above and beyond any given single rule or clobber text. That’s why I’m not just able, but required to move past such clobber verses on a host of topics where the trajectory demands that we do so, such as the full equality of women inside and outside the church, the celebration of same-sex love and marriage, the abolition of slavery, and the potential goodness of investment, insurance, revolution, and peaceable pluralism, among other things.

Those who complain about being persecuted in this world for being Christian often fail to realize that the problem isn’t their faith.
It’s that they aren’t behaving Christian enough. The world isn’t angry with Christians for believing in God. They are angry because so many Christians act like the Devil all day long.