Jesus Hates Taxes

Jesus Hates Taxes With thanks to a Facebook Friend

Taking the Bible Seriously

My friend Mark has written an excellent blog post on the idea of "taking the bible seriously" versus "taking the bible literally". Maps and Language and Happy New Year.

Mark writes:

The over valuing of literal ways of expressing our experience of reality needs challenging. Literal truth doesn't help us talk about the most important things, and when you force yourself to speak literally, you end up saying some very silly things about those important things. The most obvious example of this is God talk where 'taking the bible literally' has become for some the same as, 'taking it seriously', or reading it honestly and not complicating it with 'man made' interpretations.

How not to read the bible

I came across and interesting post and I think that the following text is worth considering.

Netiquette demands a citation, otherwise I would be plagiarising. I do want to state the following: that I don't like the language of the first paragraph of the post and that I think it engages in a 'them and us' dualism that is unhelpful.

So why am I quoting the text? Because I do actually think that the 'it's all about me' approach to reading the bible is a huge problem.

The author suggests that many of us have learned to approach the bible in the following way (I know that I have):

1. It is about me. Whatever the book, be it Pentateuch, prophets, psalms, gospel or epistle—it is talking about me.

2. It tells me what to do or what not to do. An action is required on my part. My ability to do or not to do what the bible tells me is equal to my goodness or wickedness.

3. It condemns those that are different from me. People who are non-Christian (those who freely admit their lack of faith or worse profess a false faith) or unchristian (people who say they are Christian but demonstrate their lack of salvation by their actions, whether it be thinking premarital sex is not bad or going to an Episcopal church).

4. It implies the opposite. Every pronouncement of grace points to my own condemnation if I fail. Every promise is a threat. Everything that God does, reveals what I must do.

Hermeneutics and Kerygma

Buried within the comments section of the previous post, How to Dialogue with “Liberal” Christians, Stephen Cook of the Biblische Ausbildung blog made the following comment:

Over time, I've given a lot of thought to this topic that you raise. I've come down to thinking in terms of "dangers" that threaten the liberal and "dangers" that threaten the conservative. For the conservative, I believe, the danger is being "anti-hermeneutical." I.e., not realizing that the biblical texts often require sophisticated wrestling in order to yield their truths. You can't be pedestrian in your reading of the Bible! For the liberal, the danger is being "anti-Kerygmatic." I.e., not realizing that the biblical texts bear a powerful witness, Word, Kerygma, and vitality, that transcends the limitations of their human authors. What do you think??

I thought this comment deserved a discussion of its own.

I'll open by saying, as someone raised in a denomination that believes the bible to be verbally inspired, inerrant and infallible (hereafter VIII), that the "anti-hermeneutical" comment resonated a lot with me. I'm not wildly well versed on the academic side of this; I don't know how or if VIII scholars go about developing an anti-hermenutical argument. I DO know that, amongst the people in the pews, there will be a rigourous denial of "interpreting" Scripture, so one is hardly going to get them to admit that they have a process for doing so.

Equally, I also had the experience of studying for a theology BA in the 1970s, and the anti-Kerygmatic approach was rife in academia at the time. I've said - and I believe it's true - that to write a paper indicating that one believed in God would have resulted in a very low grade. By my senior year in university (fourth and last year), I was already thinking that there had to be a better way somewhere in between total disbelief and inerrantism (or at least somewhere a bit more conservative than Tillich and Teillard).