The Blue Parakeet, 2nd Page 4
This wall might illustrate what happens when we convert the genius of a generation into fossilized, inflexible tradition. The wall, though it does get tourists like Kris and me to walk its entire length, is in the way. It is like reading the Bible through tradition. First you must scale it, traverse it, and descend it before you even have a chance of enjoying the inside of the city.
So how can we read the Bible with both a “return and retrieval” reading and a respect for the Great Tradition? I suggest we learn to read the Bible with the Great Tradition. We dare not ignore what God has said to the church through the ages (as the return and retrieval folks often do), nor dare we fossilize past interpretations into traditionalism. Instead, we need to go back to the Bible with our eyes on the Great Tradition so we can move forward through the church and speak God’s Word in our days in our ways. When we do this, we must also be conscious of keeping our fresh speaking of God’s Word in our day connected organically to the Great Tradition. We need to go back without getting stuck (the return problem), and we need to move forward without fossilizing our ideas (traditionalism). We want to walk between these two approaches. It’s not easy, but I contend that the best of the evangelical approaches to the Bible and the best way of living the Bible today is to walk between these approaches. It is a third way.
In this approach we are to give the Bible primacy, like the “return and retrieval” crowd and the Reformers and (too often) unlike the traditionalists. The traditionalist approach too often swallows up the Bible with its tradition. But we are also to move forward by setting the Bible loose to renew and keep on renewing who we are, what we think, how we express the gospel, and how we live out the gospel in our world. Yet unlike traditionalists, we don’t freeze or fossilize our expressions of the gospel. What we decide is our way for our day. We expect the next generation to do the same. Reading the Bible with the Tradition gives us guidance, but it also gives us freedom to reexpress the Tradition. In the last part of this book I will provide a few examples to show that reading the Bible with the Tradition sometimes means we will disagree with the Tradition even if we respect it.
Is there a danger here too? This approach, because it loves to return to the Bible, can easily slide into hyper-innovation. And because it reads the Bible with the Tradition, it can also fall prey to traditionalism. So what can we do to avoid this hyper-innovation weakness? It’s simple, and we are seeing more and more today who are doing it. We need to have profound respect for our past without giving it the final authority. I have not said much about the Nicene Creed, but it will perhaps illustrate our point: When I read the Bible I keep my eye on the Nicene Creed, not because it is infallible but because it is the deposit of the church’s wise and faithful interpretation of what the Bible says about God. I believe the final decision should always rest with the Scripture, but dismissal of the Great Tradition is foolish. Not so much respect that we fall into traditionalism, but enough to slow us down to ask how God has spoken to the church in the past. We show serious respect for our past when we learn our church history, when we learn how major leaders read the Bible in the past, and when we bring their voices to the table as we learn how to read the Bible for our time.6
Kris and I, along with our son Lukas and his wife, Annika, are now active members of an Anglican church in our area (Church of the Redeemer). Our church wonderfully combines the Great Tradition—we recite the Nicene Creed weekly, we use the church’s lectionary for our Scripture readings and sermon, we celebrate Communion (called Eucharist) each week—with a flexibility that our pastors discern as they are prompted by the Spirit. The Great Tradition provides parameters and wisdom while the Spirit guides us to what we need for our church each week. All Spirit with no Great Tradition creates chaos; all Great Tradition with no Spirit creates traditionalism. Walking the balance beam is what life in the Spirit today is all about. That balance beam walks between conservation and innovation, about which I will say more in part 5 of this book.
Renewal carries forward God’s timeless and historic message in a timely and cultured way for our day. We know that what we discern for our day is timely but not timeless. Making timeliness timeless is fossilizing. Our task is to take the timely timelessness of the Bible and make it timely timeliness for our world. We need to go back to the Bible’s timely timelessness so we can come forward to live out the Bible in our timely timeliness. (Don’t try to say that too fast.)
The Bible and I Story, Continued
I have to make a confession. Somewhere along the line while I was learning to read the Bible and while I was coming to terms with my own question, during seminary and doctoral research my wide-eyed wonder of Scripture diminished, and the jaw-dropping surprises were fewer and farther between. My desire to master the Bible and put it all together into my own system drained the Bible of its raw, edgy, and strange elixirs. I was caging and taming the Bible’s blue parakeets.
Many Bible teachers go through a period when teaching the Bible is a job and studying theology seems to do little more than put bread on the table. Many of us will admit that at times the mystery, the thrill, and the intoxicating attractions fade. But most of us—and this happened for me—come out the other end of that dimly lit and foggy tunnel to find the light. Some call this life beyond the tunnel a “second naïveté.” While teaching undergraduates—this was more of a process than an event—I gave up overpowering and silencing the blue parakeets in the Bible and began once again to listen to the Bible. The combination of students asking questions and those startling blue parakeet passages in the Bible awakened in me my earlier passions. Once again, as if drinking some eternal ambrosia, I found renewal and a renewing joy in the good news. I began to hear the blue parakeets again. The question came back with full force, and I embraced it as my own.
I now have no desire to tame blue parakeets. The Bible is what the Bible is, and I believe it. “Let the Bible be the Bible” is my motto, because teaching the Bible has taught me that the Bible will do its own work if we get out of the way and let it. Someone once said that the Bible needs no more defending than a lion, and I agree.
I have learned that when we take our hands off the pages of the Bible, read and listen to its words, and enter into its story by faith, something happens. It renews and continues to renew its powers. It becomes what it was meant to be, something both more intimate than an old pair of jeans and more unusual than alien creatures, something like a familiar stranger or an unpredictable neighbor or a pet lion whose presence invigorates its surroundings. Something like the glory of the ocean, which on the surface appears gentle and strolling and pleasant to observe, but under that surface there’s a vibrant, teeming, swirling, dynamic world full of beauty and wonder. Or perhaps listening to the Bible is like having the most powerful person in the world sit down with you for coffee as a friend and chat with you.
Join me as we enter into the world of reading the Bible in such a way that it comes to life for us, in such a way that it is renewing and ever renewing, in such a way that we learn how to live it out. Three words tell us how to read the Bible, and we will devote a section to each:
Story
Listening
Discerning
That’s all we need to know. It’s all in those three words.
PART 1
STORY
What Is the Bible?
In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.
Hebrews 1:1–2
CHAPTER 3
INKBLOTS AND PUZZLES
How, Then, Are We Reading?
In the 1990s, Kris heard about a new kind of book called Magic Eye, and she bought one for our kids for Christmas. Perhaps you remember the popularity of Magic Eye books. Whether you do or don’t, I hope you can find one somewhere and look at its pictures, which really aren’t pictures. They are autostereograms. The pictu
res in these books, if we let our eyes do what they can do, somehow transform from normal two-dimensional images into three-dimensional images. In front of you is what appears to be a flat picture, perhaps with some dots. But if you look at that picture just right—if you have eyes to see!—what you think is an ordinary picture of dots and an assortment of shapes begins to take on life. We see humans and flowers and planets in the sky in three dimensions. (I have to admit that this is pretty easy for me. I have been standing where men stand in designated rooms for men in public buildings and had the wall in front of me, nothing more than ordinary wallpaper, take on 3D!)
What we are looking for in reading the Bible is the ability to turn the two-dimensional words on paper into a three-dimensional encounter with God, so that the text takes on life and meaning and depth and perspective and gives us direction for what to do today. Gaining Magic Eyes ushers us into the renewal way of reading the Bible.
Perhaps another analogy will work. Who of us, once having read C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, can forget the scene where Eustace Scrubb and Lucy and Edmund Pevensie stare at a picture on a wall of a Narnian ship when suddenly the picture draws them into a whole new world. Suddenly that picture on the wall comes alive, and they begin to feel the breeze, smell the air, and hear sounds. The kids are magically drawn into the painting and find themselves in the water, where they are helped into a boat with the enticing name Dawn Treader. These kids, now in a new reality, travel to distant lands looking for the seven lost lords of Narnia. At the end of their adventures they find a lamb that turns into Aslan. Great story.
It is that sort of adventure with the Bible that we are looking for, the adventure of staring at the Bible’s words on paper only to find ourselves drawn into the story itself. We feel it, taste it, hear it, and come to know it with such perspective and depth that it renews us. That kind of renewal gives us courage to begin living it all over again in our world, but in a new way for a new day. This is the way of renewal.
No Shortcuts!
We find our Magic Eyes and we are drawn up onto the Dawn Treader only when we learn to read the Bible as a story. The Bible’s story, in the simplest of categories, has a plot with a
Beginning (Genesis 1–11), a (long, long)
Middle (Genesis 12–Malachi 4; Matthew–Revelation), and an End (Matthew 25; Romans 8; Revelation 21–22).
I am tempted to dive right now into this story, to show that reading every passage in the Bible in light of the story draws us into the story. But we first have to point out some shortcuts too many of us have been taking. In our next chapter we will begin to look at the story of the Bible and its plot.
I wish I could explain it all, but I can’t. Somewhere we’ve gone astray, and we’ve stopped reading the Bible as story. Our intent, and it is the right one, is to get something out of the Bible for our daily lives. I too want the Bible to be a “light on my path” (Psalm 119:105), and I’m sure you do as well. But, because reading the Bible as story takes more time, thinking, and discerning, we’ve developed routines and techniques that get us to our goal sooner. We’ve learned the CliffsNotes version of the Bible; we’ve developed shortcuts to grace. In my years of teaching the Bible, I’ve found five shortcuts to grace from listening to students and church folk who reveal how they read the Bible in the questions they ask.
One of my son’s good friends, Kevin Patterson, is short and a little heftier than he’d like to be. Kevin, like a cairn terrier, is always up for a new challenge. Several years ago, Kevin acquired a desire to work on his body, but the old-fashioned way of running and lifting and doing sit-ups wasn’t working for him, so he decided that AbTronic was the answer. Caught in the lure of a TV ad, Kevin became convinced that if he bought this contraption, a device that fit around his belly and sent short electronic impulses to contract his muscles, he’d lose weight. The rationale given was impeccable: “It’s that easy and thirty minutes daily is usually all it takes to help improve figure problems.” (So says the Internet ad.) Here’s the pillow promise: “Muscles can be shaped while you are reading, relaxing, walking, or doing housework.” Ergo, buy the thing!
So for about a month, whenever Kevin came by (to play on our son’s Xbox), he wore his AbTronic device. After all, it said it “tones and tightens your upper abs, lower abs, and love handles with no sweat at all.” The picture of a well-toned man in his mind didn’t hurt. “Say good-bye to strenuous, time-consuming workouts. With the AbTronic, your muscles are moving but you are not.” Just what Kevin wanted—he could play Xbox and lose weight. We’ve since learned that these devices don’t accomplish what they say they will. Kevin will fess up that it didn’t work.
Here’s my point: many of us, instead of taking the longer but more rewarding path of reading the Bible as story, want a shortcut, an AbTronic approach to Bible reading. We want to get the benefits—a toned body—without the effort of working out. We want the electronic impulse of contact with God and grace for the day without the effort of exercising our minds by reading the Bible and discerning how it all fits together and how we can live it out in our day in our way. Just as shortcuts in exercise prevent full health benefits, so also shortcuts in Bible reading affect our spiritual health.
Here are a few shortcuts that I’ve observed:
Shortcut 1: Morsels of Law
For some, the Bible is a massive collection of laws—what to do and what not to do. It is not difficult to understand how the Bible, which contains plenty of commandments and prohibitions—there are 613 in the Old Testament alone—can gradually give us the impression that it is a collection of legal morsels, a law book. Nor is it an uncommon experience, especially for the younger generation, to express the sentiment that “law book” is how they were taught the Bible, and it turned them off to the Bible.
Why? It begins with God. God becomes the Law-God, usually a little ticked off and impatient. Our relationship to God becomes conditioned by whether we are good citizens. There’s another ugly element to the mistake of making the Bible a law book: what it does to us. We, the Obedient Ones, become insufferable. How so? We . . .
become intoxicated with our own moral superiority,
become more concerned with being right than being good, and become judgmental.
In short, law-book readers become pompous, self-righteous, and accusatory. Sometimes we become resentful that others haven’t caught up to our level of holiness. I use “we” because I, like the Delphic oracle, know whereof I speak.
I was a teenage legalist and considered myself one of the Obedient Ones. We happily tossed away a few of the Bible’s commands, like loving our enemies and caring for orphans and widows, because we were crusaders and zealots for wholehearted obedience to the commands of God. In their place we added more commandments, and the ones that particularly appealed to me were “thou shalt not dance,” “thou shalt not go to movies,” “thou shalt not drink,” and “thou shalt not play cards (except Rook or Dutch Blitz).” (God was still uttering his timeless commands in King James English in the sixties and seventies, at least he did in my church.) It was these “thou shalt nots” that made me particularly righteous because it convinced me, in front of God and the whole world, that I had joined an elite fraternity of the faithful. I could go on, but you probably get the picture.
There is, of course, an important place for the Bible’s laws, commandments, and prohibitions. If you read Psalm 119 in one sitting, which is possible even if difficult, you will encounter an ancient Israelite who found utter delight in the Lawgiver and his laws. You will find a psalmist who loved God. You will find a man (I assume) who didn’t see laws as a burden but as the good revelation of God on how to walk in this world with God in such a way that it would lead to the blessing of God. Yes, commandments aplenty can be found in the Bible. Commandments as such are good; they are God telling us how best to live.
But converting the story of the Bible, and we’ll get to this in the next chapter, into a collection of little more than commandm
ents completely distorts the Bible. We need to move on.
Shortcut 2: Morsels of Blessings and Promises
In 1551 a certain Stephanus divided the New Testament into numbered verses. We are thankful (with some groans). Thankful, because now it is much easier to refer to a specific part of the Bible. It is easier to say “John 1:14” than to say, “That line in the Bible where it says, ‘The Word became flesh.’ ” Numbering verses is one thing, but when publishers provide a Bible where the only divisions are chapters and verses, as if each verse were a new paragraph, reading the Bible as a story is much more difficult. Take your favorite novel or book, photocopy a page, cut out each sentence, number each sentence, and then paste them back onto a page with each number beginning at the left margin, and you’ll see the problem. It’s much harder to read a book that way. One has to wonder what got into the head of publishers who started doing this. It’s a colossal mistake.
Even more importantly, we need to observe what versification did to how we read the Bible. Dividing the Bible up into verses turns the Bible into morsels and leads us to read the Bible as a collection of divine morsels, sanctified morsels of truth. We pause for each one to see if we can get something from it. Now I want to meddle with a significant problem. For some morsel readers of the Bible, the Bible has become a collection of morsels of blessings, with calendars including one blessing for each day of the week.