Further to the last post...
I do still think the Bible is important, and that a major part of Christian life should involve struggling with it deeply, not just picking and choosing in a facile way which parts to believe in, and which to reject. Religion shouldn't just be whatever we want it to be; we shouldn't make God in our image. If our beliefs are just 'all about me' what's the point? It's worth aligning oneself with a living tradition, and taking its ideas seriously — including some ideas that we might otherwise dismiss as crazy or just plain wrong without really thinking about it. (Assuming, that is, that some of the central ideas also really resonate with you — for me, that would be Christian ideas like 'love as the only law' and 'God becoming human in order to be with us'). I think doing so can be good for us in very deep ways. We're such a self-driven, radically individual culture (and then we wonder why we feel cut off, alienated, and lonely). We're so sure we're so much wiser than the people of the past — the idea that 'newer is better' is so ingrained in us. Engaging thoughtfully with a living tradition might just broaden us, and leave us a little less tightly bound to our culture and ego.
To step back for a second, one of the things that keeps with me obsessed with reading and learning in general is the fact that... no matter what I'm thinking or struggling with, there's people much smarter and better than me who have thought and struggled with it too... and written good books about it! Not to say that reading a book is a substitute for doing your own thinking and struggling, but it can help! It can help you in your own thinking and struggling. So in our struggles with idea of a living loving mysterious God — with the idea of ultimate Goodness as a personal being — and with the reality of living with and reflecting that God... there's worth in reading the writings of others who who have done the same. Especially those who were among the first to think and experience such things, and whose writings have even encouraged countless others who have come after them.
(The Bible's been beta-tested to death, my friends. This reminds me of the best explanation I've ever heard for why the four gospels are part of the canon, and not others that were also written in roughly the same period. Simply put, the early believers found that the Jesus they found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John corresponded best to the Jesus that had been preached to them and that they found at work in their own lives. The Jesus of the gospels was the Jesus who had changed them.)1
You know, there's something powerful and unique about the origins. There's a life and energy to an original genre-launching artistic expression that is lost when that genre is established. Do something powerful and fresh and there's bound to be copyers. But you can never copy that originary power because part of made that origin powerful was that it was not a copy, that at the time, no one had done anything quite like it.
I think there's a difference between being a copyer... and being a follower, though. Real punks don't sound like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. But they might still deserve the name 'punk.'
Being true to an origin means grasping it creatively, or perhaps being grasped creatively by that origin.
The letter kills, but the spirit brings life, as the good book says. Words on a page are dead, even in that good book, and imperfect — at the least, imperfect simply by virtue of being a manifestation of human language. (Language can't perfectly describe, capture, or represent... anything, much less God!) But the spirit can bring those black marks on paper alive,2 so they do actually become the Word of God for us. So they become truth, or maybe even Truth, for us, for a little while. (The evidence of Truth is always that it changes our lives...)
But it doesn't just have to be the good book. It can also be a movie, a song (by a secular band even!), a conversation with a friend, a tree. This might sound bizarre, but when I was a teen and a friend of mine died, the movie The Crow 'ministered' to me a lot more than my youth group did.
I think the problem is that when it comes to the Bible it becomes such a 'all or nothing' kind of thing for so many Christians. More about that next time.
1. There's also the fact that the four gospels tend to be some of the earliest narratives of the life of Jesus. But a notable exception like the Gospel According to Thomas is a good example of the principle I'm explaining. While in agreement with a fair bit from Mark and Luke, that gospel also shows things like Jesus teaching that in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, a woman must become a man. (How? Uh...spiritually, of course. Whatever that means. Don't ask questions!) That's not the Jesus I feel at work in my life, and I think even Christians living in the context of patriarchal Roman/Jewish culture felt the same way.
2. I offer a longwinded explanation of why 'spirit' and 'alive' are synonymous , or to set the background even more thoroughly, here.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
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