So here’s what you do. You take a phrase or a word or a short teaching out of the Bible. Something like “The book of life,” or “The Son of Man,” or “The Light of the World,” or “No one comes to the Father but by me.” These phrases could mean anything. They meant something in their day, surely, but the deepest and most scholarly study in the world cannot unravel exactly what they meant.
But you. You somehow know the truth. You take these phrases with no study at all, and you fill them with your theology, like someone filling helium balloons at a carnival. Then you hang a little basket below your balloons and float away, so delighted in the complex theological construct that you’ve put together. And from your elevated position you lay burdens on people that you could never keep yourself. Lightening bolts thrown down from the sky. Zeus never wielded as much power.
You are going to hell for your lack of faith or for your participation in a religious life or non-religious life that I don’t understand and therefore don’t approve of.
You may not be a sexual person, but must live in strict, celibate loneliness. You will fall in love many times over the years, but you must deny your love and break your own heart over and over and over again, all the days of your life. (And this from a preacher who can’t say no to a second bowl of ice cream.)
You must believe the things I tell you about the world, the earth, the sky, the stars, and God. You must give intellectual consent to all parts of my message. And if you cannot believe what I say, SHAME on you! Shame on you even if you tried very hard to believe but could not.
Give me your life; give me your money; give me your mind; give me your time. Give me all of these things, and I shall take them from you and use them to fill up more balloons so that I can fly higher and throw my lightening bolts down on more people.
And the hard thing for me is that you think this is the right way to treat the Bible and the mysterious phrases found within it. In your mind, you are the great Bible scholar, while I am a little weak in this regard. Weak and liberal and not very serious about the Bible.
For I, in my weakness, can hardly stand before the mystery of the ancient scriptures. I am hurt by them, filled with joy by them, angered by them, and sometimes inspired by them. And I often can do nothing more than confess my own confusion and brokenness.
You shake your head at me and say, “What kind of a minister are you? Don’t you believe the Bible?”
And I look back at you, just as puzzled. “Believe the Bible?” What does that even mean? I say it over and over to myself.
“Believe the Bible. Believe the Bible. Believe the Bible. Believe the Bible.”
Eventually the word “believe” starts to sound like something you do with your hands. Like punching something or pushing a vacuum cleaner around. Like you could believe the Bible all over the house and then out into the front yard, where you could believe it around in little circles while waving to the neighbors. Then you could believe the Bible back into your house and store it in the closet, where you keep it until you feel like believing it out in public again.
Do I believe the Bible? I’m trying to know the Bible. And by knowing, I mean the way that Adam knew Eve, and the way that the Creator knows us. I mean the kind of knowing that is like falling in love. I’m trying to love/know the Bible. And I will always struggle with how I can love/know the scriptures when some parts are so hard and mean and awful that you feel bad for even reading them. And then some parts are so beautiful that you can’t stop crying when they whisper little hints of truth and mystery to you.
So that’s all I’ve got. Whatever that says about me is what I am. I’m less sophisticated and more unsure than when I began years ago as a young minister. I’m tired and fairly broken myself. I just turned 47, so I’m half dead if I live to be an old man, and more than half dead if I don’t. So there’s just no time left, really. No time for talking or fighting or judging.
It seems like it is the time for listening and loving and accepting all who seek truth in peace and are open-minded enough to confess that they are simply not up to the task.
rlp
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And like you, I grow ever less certain of the details all the time, and, again perhaps like you, ever more certain of the center. Perhaps it helps to have attended a liberal seminary, where everything we thought we knew was dismantled and we learned we could survive that experience. That may not have been the Baptist way, but it's very important to me as a Reformed pastor to stand up several times a year and say, "I don't know what this means. Here's what I think, and here's what others think, but you have to think too, and ask too, and receive too."
However, it seems to me that those who want very badly not to believe act in much the same way as many who want very much to cling to the beliefs they have. "I know what it says!" they insist. "I know exactly!" They thump the book and shout, "It says right here, and it's wrong. Wrong! False!" But they never admit they might have mistaken the meaning.
Yet, it is the uncertainty of meaning that drives one to find the truth, whatever that might be. I think that's a bit better. Of course, it's a never-ending quest, but that's okay.
I kinda thought you might have had some of the stuff I’ve written in mind when you wrote that second paragraph. Whether yea or nay…the fact is that the indictment is applicable to both sides of the Bible argument.
I really do not try to fathom what the Bible is actually saying. As far as I am concerned, the best guess that can be made about it (and that appears to be all we can do, make a guess) is that it is a self-serving history of the early Hebrew people interspersed with the mythology of those people. If my sense of history is correct, the early Hebrews lived in an area where the various peoples all had rather ferocious, demanding, vindictive gods—and the mythology of the Hebrews seemed to be no exception.
I am not, by the way, convinced that the early Hebrews thought there was only one god…as many people argue, but that there was one god, among many, who was special to them and to whom they owed complete loyalty to the exclusion of any others. Several passages in the Old Testament seem to lead in that direction—but I suspect you know this better than I.
I often isolate individual passages if it is appropriate in my mind to do so. I understand scholars like you may have strong disagreement with that, but I have to go with what I truly “feel in my heart.”
Some of the passage with which I deal frequently are not really open to much wiggle room. The passages in Leviticus about homosexual activity and slavery are so clear-cut…the only way they can be mitigated is by mangling logic and reason.
The only people who would go through that trouble…to mangle and torture logic and reason…are people who are unwilling to accept that the passages are not the product of a god…but of a fairly primitive people.
We’ll talk some more on this. Very interesting subject. Well presented.
LOL, you really have no idea who you're instructing. I am the most obsessive writer ever. This issue you bring up with using "you" as a kind of generic third person pronoun...I've been thinking about that for years. I'm not just aware of the issue, I've worked it from every angle and written in both ways. You might want to see if you can awake Hemingway from his death sleep, because apparently he was wrong too, having used "you" in that manner for his entire career.
I'm sorry, but you're incorrect here. For a couple of reasons:
1. Common usage always wins the day eventually. And it has won this battle in the U.S. If you use "one," you sound like you're from England. For any kind of informal writing, using "one" would not work.
2. You seem to have a kind of singular idea about writing, as though there is only one kind of writing. I write essays that are meant to convey a lot of emotion. Because I feel a lot. For me to adopt a more formal style couldn't be more wrong in this setting. It would KILL these essays.
I've dealt with editors. Most would agree with me.
Now in an academic setting or some other setting where more formal language is required, yes, one would avoid the use of "you" in such a common manner. And in that setting, that's exactly what I would do.
But a blog is about as far from that setting as "you" can get.
One of the scriptures I do remember is that we are to love our enemies and pray for those who despitefully use us and persecute us. I haven't heard a prayer for our enemies in church since 9/11 because our enemies or God's enemies and like Jonah we don't want them to repent. We want them dead.
Next, I feel we should all go dangle our participles!
And we've hijacked Gordon's very thoughtful thread with nonsensical grammar comments. I do apologize.
I love the part about "believe" becoming something you do with your hands. Solid writing about an odd sensation, literary in its allusions, weirdly recognizable.
Hang in there. Faithlessness is an art, but worth it. Lovingkindness will not disappear, but it will become much more precious and poignant, once you no longer "believe".
(i like the picture. bending over backwards is not necessary, tho, with plain facts, like gravity)
I think some of the most dangerous people are the ones who say they know "The Truth", and we are all damned because we don't.
You trying to convert me? lol.
You sound like someone grappling with rationality, is all. I really do like how you express it.
"You seem to be dismantling your belief just fine without any help."
Some within the faith community have said so. I for one do not know. I'm just on for the ride. I'm pretty damn committed to acting like there is a God anyway.
Anyway, that was a hilarious thing to say. You're like my friend from my previous post, the one in the diner.
And close my eyes and stop my ears to the inflowing of any information that might, at some future point, cause fissures in the foundation..except for medical information; it's ok if that keeps evolving and changing. I'm getting older, I need up-to-date data and drugs to keep me alive as long as possible, because while I say I KNOW, I really DON'T know, and- bottom line- ...I'm afraid.
Thus, I seek Truth instead; because I know there will be a garden of new questions there- new colors, tastes, and sounds. And questions always demand that I step from my fears into some depth of the Unknown, where I can be alive until I die, instead of dying and waiting (and waiting) to be buried.