Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Wrestling with Authority

This is my second engagement with Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity.  This section deals with his second question for the new church, "How should the Bible be understood?"

Thinking about the Bible's overarching narrative of "Who are we as God's people?" helps me think about how we should read and interpret this collection of stories.

Instead of thinking of these stories as a constitutional how-to guide for living faithfully as God's people, it is helpful to think of them as we do many stories - they help us understand a little more about who we are and how we live, rather than tell us what to do.

When thinking about how we understand scripture, I tend to think of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and the famous quote: "I cannot tell a lie."

Yet, that story is false.

Yep.  Never happened.

However, the deeper truth that is conveyed by this familiar story is true.  The idea that the father of our country was honest and valued his integrity is true.  The idea that we should emulate that honesty and integrity is even more true.  The story resonates with us because we have been in situations that are similar.

This is how our stories in scripture work with us.  Some of my personal favorites are Jacob wrestling with God and the story of Job, are just a couple of these stories that really resonate with the truth of what it means to be a child of God.

Jacob wrestles with God and is forever changed by that experience, as noted in the story by the limp and the name change.  When we hear this story it resonates with us.

We encounter God.

We wrestle with God.

We are changed by challenging, questioning, and engaging God.

Job experiences great tragedy, and struggles to understand how such a thing could happen to him.  Even though those who are around him encourage him to renounce God or confess his (imaginary) sins before God, Job maintains his innocence and refuses to turn his back on God.  Yet, God comes to Job and informs him, none too kindly, that trying to pin down how God works is not a good plan.

We experience tragedy.

We hear people tell us that it is because of our sins.  We hear people encourage us to turn our backs on God.

We don't understand how God works.

These stories speak to us with an authority beyond that of a "how-to guide."  These stories speak to our hearts and are given authority by their power as stories of the human condition.

Why do we need to give them authority beyond that?  Isn't the fact that thousands of years later, these stories still resonate with the hearts and minds of their audience authoritative enough?

For example, when we read Leviticus or some of the Epistles as a set of laws instead of hearing a story of how people tried to define themselves as God's people, we lose something in the cultural translation.

We think slavery is bad, so the rules for slavery are out of date.

We believe women should have equal voice and rights, so the rules about women are out of date.

However, when we see how the rest of the Middle Eastern world, the Jewish (and Paul's) ideas on how to treat slaves indicates that we should treat them respectfully and break societal conventions with how we should treat those over whom we have authority.

When we look at how women were being treated in the Greco-Roman world, we see how the authors  are trying to wrestle with being a child of God in that time period.

Just as we wrestle with what it means to be a child of God in our time.

We might never come up with a satisfactory answer, but then again, Jacob didn't really get an answer when he wrestled with God.  In fact, Jacob got a limp and a name change.

It was the wrestling that was important.

The desire to engage God is what gives the scriptures their authority, and as long as we do that in love we listen to the authority of God.

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