An Invitation to Read the Sacred Books

*Editor's note: As we journey through this season of expectation for the coming of our king, we thought it would be appropriate to do something a little different. As we approach Christmas, take care in reading the precious gift of Scripture. Please enjoy this adaptation of an essay in http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifThe Sacred Books, now on sale for just $1.99 each at IBSDirect.com. -Paul Berry

A long time ago the followers of Jesus collected their sacred writings together. They called them ta biblia— “the little books.” This collection is what we now call the Bible. The Holy Scriptures. It is comprised of the First Testament and the New Testament.

The Bible is a large collection of different books and writings that together tell a single story. It is a story spanning a long period of time and it tells of many people, places and practices.

Like any ancient story, it takes a little getting used to. It may be a little confusing in places. Things were different back then. Very different.

Of course, things were also the same.

Some things don’t change.

Since the Bible is such a big collection, it may help to know the overall direction of the story. I find it useful to arrange the drama of the Bible into the following six acts:

1. Intention: God’s Song of Creation
2. exile: from beauty to brokenness
3. Light and Dark: The Calling of Israel
4. Lost and Found: The Surprising Victory of Jesus
5. New Journey: The People of God for the World
6. Reunion: God’s Return to Us

There are lots of kinds of literature in the Bible: historical narrative, love poetry, apocalyptic vision, song lyrics, prophecy, wisdom sayings, letters and more. It’s worth paying attention to this. For instance, you can’t read song lyrics like a letter, or the metaphors of apocalyptic literature as if they were historical narrative.

The overall approach you take to the Bible is also important. It is not a collection of important facts or spiritual principles, although it does have some of these. It’s not a law book, although it also contains some of these. And it’s not a presentation of some timeless system of salvation, religious or otherwise.

It’s a story.

If you know stories, then you know they’re all about time and place and people. The events described in The Sacred Books took place over a long period of time with particular people and in particular places.

This also makes it history.

It happened.

It’s important that you read it as a story. A lot of people read it as something else. It’s too bad, because this makes them go off on all kinds of false trails and distracting tangents. Basically taking a piecemeal approach and missing the forest for the trees.

My advice is that you stick with the story, and don’t assume you already know what it’s going to say. Sometimes the telling of this story by others has somewhat distorted what the sacred books actually say.

An ancient Jewish midrash (or commentary) on the book of Genesis has God saying, “I will make Adam first and if he goes astray I will send Abraham to sort it all out.” Well, astray he went. So Abraham’s family, Israel, was called and sent on a mission from God to sort it all out. This story of Israel takes up a very good portion of the whole book. Then when Israel was having a tough time of it, Jesus came along claiming he wanted to get this mission back on track. Paul followed later and, after a personal encounter with Jesus, got his life turned around. He then set out to tell the story to the rest of the world because it all had to do with them too.

The whole thing meanders around, with lots of fits and starts, making you wonder if it is ever going to get there. But it does come together. At the very end you’ll notice it sounds strangely familiar to the very beginning. It turns out that when God intends something, he doesn’t give up until it happens the way he wanted. A divine perseverance, you might call it.

Just one more thing before you start. Who’s reading this story and how they read it is probably as important as the story itself. The Bible says that two people can hear the exact same message and one will benefit from it while the other will gain nothing, in fact, may even be worse off than before. Jesus often said: “Whoever has ears, let them hear.” He was clearly assuming it was possible for a lot of people (who by all appearances were listening to him, and presumably with ears) to somehow not hear.

I’m ashamed to tell you how often my own ears have been plugged up.

I’ve found it’s worth a prayer to ask for help. (The story itself tells about many mighty works of God, so what’s one more after all those other ones?)

Above all, don’t ever forget . . .

. . . it’s a story.

And it’s inviting you in to take your part.

Whoever has ears, let them hear.

—Glenn

(adapted from The Sacred Books, copyright © 2005 by International Bible Society)

On the Difficulty of Paradigm Shifts (Part 2: A Modernistic Bible)

The biggest challenge in any paradigm shift is getting one’s mind to accept the fundamental reorientation. For instance, relativity theory in modern physics invited people to consider that some of their basic, intuitive perceptions of the world were not correct. For both scientists and the larger society the transition was difficult.

In the Bible reading world, change is also hard. The chapter and verse system (c&v) has been comprehensively applied and is deeply ingrained. By now our use of it is second nature, reflexive. It has become more than the way we see the Bible—it has become part of the Bible itself for many of us.

Losing it can seem unimaginable. Or, perhaps it can seem imaginable only in part. Some folks have said to me, “Reading without c&v is OK, I can see that. But studying the Bible without it? I can’t see how.” It is exetremely interesting that we seem to believe that we can study the Bible without reading it. But this is what the additives have led to.

One essential element in paradigm shifts is coming to see that the old paradigm is deficient. Openness to new paradigms comes from acknowledging the limitations and even failures of the previous way of seeing things.

I have already mentioned all the specific problems with c&v (see the Why Would You Do That? blog from June 26, 2007). In many ways, a c&v Bible is a modernistic Bible. It is not an accident that the c&v imposition historically came along with the rise of modernism. It is a systematician’s dream. In speaking of the rationalistic character of modern culture in another context, Eviatar Zerubavel has written that it is “precise, punctual, calculable, standard, bureaucratic, rigid, invariant, finely coordinated, and routine.” A modernistic emphasis on the measurable leads directly to a sense of control and manipulation.

Isn’t this realistically what we’ve done with the Scriptures? A modernistic Bible is a Bible we can handle. We can navigate it quickly and powerfully through an in-depth system of shortcuts and time-savers. We can find the little pieces we want and move on. And so this immense, mysterious, living book of books becomes bite-sized and manageable.

But the downside to this control we think we’ve gained over the Bible is real. The damage is significant. We have lost touch with the books, letters and songs that the biblical authors have actually written. It is our little systems that we know more than the Bible itself.

It is time to emancipate ourselves from this mental slavery. There is another way. We do not have to rely on chapters and verses. The biblical authors themselves didn’t need them. The church has done without them for most of its history.

This paradigm shift is not easy and it will not happen overnight. But it can be done. The next time you read a passage from the Bible, take a minute and imagine how you might refer to it without a chapter and verse reference. How might you tell someone else what and where you’re reading? How and where does that passage fit into its immediately larger context? What would a natural, organic reference to it be?

Free your mind.

-Glenn