The Blue Parakeet, 2nd Read online

  On Monday we get Psalm 23:1.

  On Tuesday we get Matthew 5:3.

  On Wednesday we get Luke 11:2.

  On Thursday we get Jeremiah 31:31.

  On Friday we get Mark 14:24.

  On Saturday we get Matthew 11:28.

  On Sunday we get Romans 4:25.

  Random verses, with generosity poured on top of generosity. On other calendars we get, instead of a blessing, a promise each day—promises about things like these:

  God’s faithfulness

  God’s grace

  God’s power

  God’s love

  God’s patience

  God’s listening to our prayers

  God’s eternal plans for us

  Random verses, with blessing on top of blessing or promise on top of promise. (No one has yet composed a wrath-of-God calendar of warnings, though some seem poised to begin making such a calendar.)

  What happens to the Christian who reads the Bible, day after day and week after week, as little more than a collection of morsels of blessings and promises? (You might want to sit down with a friend and talk about this.) For one, everything is good and wonderful and light and airy. These people become optimistic and upbeat and wear big smiles . . . until something bad happens, until they enter into a period of suffering and feel distant from God, or until they hit a wall. For every hill, there is a valley. For every Joshua there’s a Job, for every new church in the Pauline and Petrine missions, there’s an imprisonment and a scar (a first-century tattoo).

  One of the most important things about the Bible is that it tells realistic truth. Sure, there are all kinds of wonderful blessings surrounding Abraham, Moses, David, and Paul . . . and there also are days of doubt, defeat, disobedience, and darkness. David was on top of the world at times, but he also asked God this question: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). Edith Humphrey, a New Testament scholar, made this important observation of what happens when we focus solely on blessings and promises: “It is unfortunately the case that some contemporary expressions of Christianity have forgotten, or are embarrassed by, this moment of dark reflection, and instead espouse an unrealistic and warped view of spiritual victory.” She also speaks of the “relentlessly upbeat” moods that lead to “false security and canned joy.”1

  It is important to know the blessings and to rely on God’s promises. Please don’t misunderstand my point. But the blessings and promises of God in the Bible emerge from a real-life story that also knows that we live in a broken world and some days are tough. The stories of real lives in the Bible reflect the truth that we are surrounded by hurting people for whom Psalm 22:1 echoes their normal day.

  Those who read the Bible as story refuse to cut up the Bible into morsels of blessings and promises because they know the Story. They know that the David who found God’s blessings and trusted in God’s promises knew the dark side of life. Imagine how the God of the universe, who chose for some reason to communicate with us in the very thing that makes humans so distinct—sophisticated language in the form of a story covering spans of time—must respond as he observes his people seeking random sayings! It’s a wonder that God hasn’t at some point made the words disappear from the page so when we open our Bibles, nothing but blank paper stares us in the face.2 We deserve it.

  Shortcut 3: Mirrors and Inkblots

  Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922), a famous Swiss Freudian psychiatrist, devised the inkblot test. You’ve probably seen one. What happens is quite straightforward: you (the patient) are shown a card on which is an inkblot; you tell the therapist that you see, say, a butterfly; and the therapist—with that special Mona Lisa smile—thinks to herself, “This person’s normal.” But if you say, “I see my neighbor’s brain” or if you start mentioning a pelvis, the therapist—with that same Mona Lisa smile—begins to think in terms of deviancy and disorders. What a person sees in the inkblot gives the therapist information about a person’s personality, emotions, and thought processes. It doesn’t matter what the inkblot is—it really isn’t anything. It gives a person an opportunity to reveal himself or herself.

  Some people read the Bible as if its passages were Rorschach inkblots. They see what is in their head. In more sophisticated language, they project onto the Bible what they want to see. If you show them enough passages and you get them to talk about them, you will hear what is important to them, whether it is in the Bible or not. They might see in the “Jesus inkblot” a Republican or a socialist, because they are Republicans or socialists. Or they may see in the book of Revelation, a favorite of inkblot readers, a sketch of contemporary international strife. Or they may have discovered in the inkblot called “Paul” a wonderful pattern for how to run a church, which just happens to be the pastor’s next big plan. You get the point—reading the Bible as an inkblot is projecting onto the Bible our ideas and our desires.

  I used to give students in my Jesus class a test each semester on opening day. (The test can be found in Appendix 2 at the end of the book.) That test asks them to fill out a basic personality questionnaire about their view of Jesus and then to answer the same questions, now slightly shifted, about themselves. The amazing result, and the test has been field-tested by some professionals, is that everyone thinks Jesus is like them! The test results also suggest that, even though we like to think we are becoming more like Jesus, the reverse is probably more the case: we try to make Jesus like ourselves. Which means, to one degree or another, we are all Rorschachers; we all project onto Jesus our own image.3

  Hardly a month goes by that I don’t get an advertisement about a new book. Inevitably, the marketing department gives me the same song and dance: “Here, for the first time, we see what Jesus was really like. Here, for the first time, we get back to Jesus as he really was.” Studies about Jesus are my professional specialization, and I am willing to say this: Anyone who says they are about to reveal what Jesus was really like is about to reveal not what Jesus was like, but what they are like. They’ve used Jesus as a Rorschach inkblot. You can count on it. I could list the books and name the names.

  Instead of being swept into the Bible’s story, Rorschach thinkers sweep the Bible up into their own story. Instead of being an opportunity for redemption, the Bible becomes an opportunity for narcissism. This is the problem with taking this shortcut: reading the Bible becomes patting ourselves on the back and finding our story in the Bible, instead of finding the Bible’s story to be our story. Instead of entering into that story, we manipulate the story so it enters into our story.

  I want to turn now to a different kind of shortcut, a hard-earned shortcut that also makes us rethink how we read the Bible.

  Shortcut 4: Puzzling Together the Pieces to Map God’s Mind

  For some people the Bible is like a big puzzle. Once you’ve got the puzzle solved, you no longer have to work with the pieces. The shortcut is that once you’ve expended the energy to solve the puzzle, the job is done—forever and a day. These people know what the Bible says before they open it because they’ve already puzzled it together.

  One of the English translations sitting on my desk has 1,153 pages. Spread over those 1,153 pages, in random order and with no clear clues as to where to begin or which pieces of information are most important, are Bible verses that contain information like pieces in a puzzle. God has scattered his mind throughout the Bible, and he gives to us, his readers, the challenge of putting the puzzle together. Puzzlers belong to what I call the Flat Bible Society. They work in a flat room, and they’ve scattered throughout the room these random puzzle bits of information from the Bible. If you pick up the right piece first and gradually work your way through every verse (the pieces of the puzzle) of the whole Bible, you will eventually get your Bible’s puzzle pieces to look like the picture on the box . . . but that’s the problem. We don’t really know what the picture looks like. We have to imagine what the complete, original picture really is.

  Truth be told, this kind of pieced-together puzz
le, the Grand System that we construct out of the pieces, is an act of theological imagination. And do you know what Mark Twain said about “imagination”? Speaking of Captain Stormfield, he said, “He had a good deal of imagination, and it probably colored his statements of fact; but if this was so, he was not aware of it.”4 Too many puzzlers don’t know that the puzzle they believe in is an imagined system of thought.

  What’s wrong with this shortcut? First, we need to think about what this Grand System, the solved puzzle, really is: it is a system of thought that presumes that we know what God was doing before the Bible was written, and once we have this puzzle in hand, we’ve got the Bible figured out. At some level, these folks think they have mapped the mind of God. Their map, or their solved puzzle, is something no author in the Bible believes. Instead, the solved puzzle is something God was revealing over time that they put together. While we don’t often think like this, the enormity of this claim boggles the mind (or it should).

  Second, this approach nearly always ignores the parts of the puzzle that don’t fit. Some evening, sit down with an encyclopedia and read the entries on the major groups in the church—Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Reformed, Congregationalists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, nondenominational, and so on. What you will undoubtedly see is that each one of these groups emphasizes something true and important in the Bible; you will also see that each one de-emphasizes or even ignores something important to the other groups. Each of these groups has a solved puzzle that guides their thinking—no one’s puzzle is complete, no one’s puzzle is perfect. Each of these groups ignores parts of the puzzle that don’t quite fit their system.

  Third, puzzling together the pieces we find in the Bible into a system is impossible. The Bible contains authors as diverse as Moses and David (who hardly ever quotes Moses), Isaiah and Ezekiel, Daniel and Matthew, John and Paul, Peter and James, as well as the author of Hebrews, and Luke. I have sometimes puzzled pieces together from all over the Bible in what I thought were clever, creative, and meaningful ways. Just as often, I have had a pit in my stomach with this worry: my puzzle is not the puzzle of anyone’s in the Bible. It is my puzzle, not the Bible’s.

  Think about it this way: it is one thing to pull together the social thinking of Charles Dickens from his novels, and many would say that can be more or less accomplished. But now let’s expand our efforts to include other novelists: Why in the world would we even try to pull together the social thinking of all nineteenth-century English novelists? This is not unlike what puzzlers are doing with the various authors of the Bible. Then why do we try to pull together all the authors of the Bible? Who ever told us that was the way to read the Bible? Some might say, “But the Bible is a unity because God is behind it all.” I agree, but who says that our system is that unity? Our next concern might shed some light on that question for you. I know it does for me.

  Fourth, puzzling calls into question the Bible as we have it. After all, had he wanted to, God could have revealed a systematic theology, chapter by chapter. But God didn’t choose this way of revealing his truth. Maybe—this “maybe” is a little facetious—that way of telling the truth can’t tell it the way God wants his truth told. What God chose to do was to give to you and me a story of Israel and the church, and we have a series of authors who tell that story and who contribute in one way or another to that story as the plot unfolds. Open a typical theology book and here are the major chapters: Introduction, God, Humans (or “Man”), Christ, Sin, Salvation, Church, Future. Open the Bible and what do you get? God, a swirl of chaos that God spins into beauty to compose a garden, into which he plops two humans and says, “Now take care of this for me.” Which is more inviting? (Please don’t say the first option.)

  So, and here I anticipate something later in the book, maybe we should follow God’s design and let the Bible be the Bible. What does that mean? Maybe it is the story of the Bible that is the system! No one has spoken more timely words here than Eugene Peterson:

  The most frequent way we have of getting rid of the puzzling or unpleasant difficulties in the Bible is to systematize it, organizing it according to some scheme or other that summarizes “what the Bible teaches.” If we know what the Bible teaches, we don’t have to read it anymore, don’t have to enter the story and immerse ourselves in the odd and unflattering and uncongenial way in which this story develops, including so many people and circumstances that have nothing to do, we think, with us.5

  What is the problem here? In one word, mastery. Those who solve the puzzle think they’ve got the Bible mastered; they have caged and tamed the Blue Parakeet who gave us the blue parakeets. God did not give the Bible in order that we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we’ve mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible. Of course, I think we should read the Bible and know it—but it is the specific element of reading for mastery versus reading to be mastered that grows out of this shortcut.

  Now I present a final shortcut, a tasty but tempting one.

  Shortcut 5: Maestros

  I like to cook, and I consider myself an amateur specialist in making risotto, an Italian way of making rice. Kris and I recently spent a week in Italy on vacation, and I ate risotto every evening, sampling the recipe of each cook’s way of making risotto. My intent was to see how a maestro di cucina, a master of the art of Italian cooking, makes risotto so I could improve my own risotto. In Stresa, near Lago Maggiore on the northern tip of Italy, we went to Hotel Ristorante Fiorentino. Carla Bolongaro welcomed, seated, and served us while her son, Luigino, the maestro di cucina, prepared our dinner. (“Dinner” seems hollow for what an Italian cook offers.) All risottos are prepared in thick-bottomed pans, the starches of the rice drawn out from the Carnaroli or Arborio rice with broth one ladle at a time. Luigino added saffron and some tasty prosciutto along with some bits of porcini mushroom (mama mia!). By the time we left, we knew we had tasted risotto at its finest.

  I don’t tell you this to make you hungry or to mention that I have several times done my best to imitate the risotto recipe of the Bolongaro family, but to say that many read the Bible the way they learn from a maestro di cucina. That is, they go to the Bible to find the master, the über-Rabbi—Jesus—at work. Then when they get up from their reading of the Bible, they imitate Maestro Jesus. “What would Jesus do?” is the only question they ask. The problem here is the word “only.”

  It is almost justifiable to make Jesus the Maestro. But more than a few of us are aware that Jesus has been eclipsed for many Bible readers by Maestro Paul. In this shortcut, Jesus is either ignored or overwhelmed by Paul’s way of thinking. Some of us grew up in churches where the thought patterns, the lenses, the grid through which everything was filtered—however unconsciously—was the book of Romans or Paul’s theology.

  I’m one such person. I grew up in a Pauline world, and I went to a college and studied the Bible in a Pauline world. Even when we dipped into the Gospels, especially at Christmas and Easter, we used Maestro Paul to inform us about what Jesus was really doing and saying. I cannot tell you what it was like when, as a first-year seminary student, I sat and listened—at 7:45 a.m. with my jaw agape—to Walt Liefeld, someone who could open the world of Jesus for me. Right then and there, in the deepest recesses of my soul, I knew I had found my life’s passion—to study and teach about Jesus. I had been tutored under Maestro Paul and found Jesus.

  The problem was not Paul. (I’ll get to him soon enough.) The problem was that I was not taught to read the Bible as a story. Many of us weren’t. I had been nurtured in a world that read the entire Bible as a solved puzzle that used Maestro Paul’s categories to understand everything else in the Bible. Reading the Bible through a maestro’s eyes gives us one chapter in the story of the Bible. One-chapter Bible readers develop one-chapter Christian lives.

  Now that I’ve pointed out some shortcuts we all too often take, what is the long way? How can
we learn to read the Bible as Story? How can we develop Magic Eyes and be drawn up onto the Dawn Treader? As the guide at the museum says as she moves on to the next room, “Step this way.”

  CHAPTER 4

  IT’S A STORY WITH POWER!

  How, Then, Shall We Read?

  Blogging may be the world’s most fascinating form of communication. Someone jots down their ideas, clicks “publish,” and those ideas instantaneously appear for the whole world to see. The world does see. More importantly, the world sometimes comments back. Sometimes anonymously and sometimes bitingly and sometimes it hurts. The first lesson a blogger learns is this: anyone in the world can say anything they want at anytime on a blog. The second lesson is this: you may not know that person. In my first week of blogging (Google Jesus Creed), I learned these two lessons, and they shocked me. One of the first questions that wandered its way through my head when I began reading a comment on something I had written was: “Who is this person anyway?”

  After years of teaching, preaching, and writing, comments and questions were common for me. I am used to being questioned. In fact, I enjoy it. But teachers know who is saying what and more often than not we also know where our students’ questions are “coming from.” But those who drop comments in the comment box on a blog can do so anonymously or with a fictitious name. Under the cloak of anonymity, they can become bold and brazen and can blast away. Incivility marks blogs far too often. To be sure, blogs form blog communities where most learn enough about other commenters that, even if we don’t know the person personally, we recognize their electronic personality. Knowing one another restores civility. Still, until one discovers “who is who” and “where they are coming from,” comments can sometimes startle and shock.

  On my blog we have developed a simple protocol: no anonymous comments. Why? Since I believe “context is everything,” contextless comments and faceless comments, which are what fictitious names or anonymous comments are, are not permitted. Anyone who speaks up anonymously or fictitiously is contextless. Until we know the context or until we know who is saying what and why, it is difficult to know how to respond.