Understanding the Bible — or not
by VivianWhile I was at the Pepperdine Lectures I heard about Shane Claiborne’s book, “The Irresistible Revolution,” and I finally started reading it. He reminds me of our friend Bill in including this quote from nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard:
“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”
Then Claiborne talks about going to work with Mother Teresa and meeting a fundamentalist (not a selective fundamentalist) who actually sold all he had and gave to the poor.
I’m looking forward to seeing what else this ordinary radical has to say, and contemplating what I might end up doing as a result.
Anything in the Bible you are trying not to understand?
July 21st, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Great post, Vivian. After reading this post and quote, I’ve got at least ten thoughts running through my brain and fighting to get out first. So where to start? Chronologically? Y’know, I have so much to say that I think I’d better just create a new post.
I love your punchline!
July 21st, 2008 at 6:07 pm
I wonder sometimes about our Bible classes. We occasionally skip a Bible class (one of two per week) and do something service oriented — but never for very many weeks in a row. Would I grow more spiritually on a given week serving those God loves or reading his word? Would God be pleased with such activity?
July 21st, 2008 at 8:19 pm
So when you say “he reminds me of our friend Bill,” I assume you are referring to the beginning of the Kierkegaard quote, the part that says “The Bible is very easy to understand,” and not to the fact that Claiborne quoted Kierkegaard — something Bill would never do, at least on purpose.
Bill is much more likely to quote (and has quoted) Mark Twain, who famously said, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts I do understand.” The reality is, as Kiergegaard, Twain, (apparently) Claiborne, and Bill all basically say, we understand far more of God’s word than we act on.
And, as you eloquently wrote, there are things in the Bible we therefore don’t want to “understand.”
Those before us (see Hebrews 11, as well as Kiergegaard, Chambers, Nouwen, etc.), and those around us who have lived out their faith, even if imperfectly or incompletely, are examples to us all to grow in our own “understanding.”
July 21st, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Mike, that’s a good question, and I wish we did more service projects. The practical reality is that service is usually messy and harder to constrain to the one hour we allot for classtime. The churches I know that engage in regular, meaningful acts of service do it on weekends or other times.
I see God displaying more fury over people who are spiritual introverts, pondering his word so intently and keeping his law so perfectly that they walk right by the wounded man on the side of the road. I feel more and more that that is the situation I’m in, and it makes me want to respond, “Enough with the spiritual growth! I am absurdly fat and lazy with the amount of it hanging off of me. It’s time to go and work it off by showing love in the concrete ways Jesus demanded: feed the hungry, show hospitality to strangers, visit the prisoners, clothe the needy, and tend the sick.”
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:50 am
I wish I were smart enough, or is it scholarly enough, to quote Kierkegaard. Or do I? Nah….Twain? Yeah, I know him. And the Bill fellow sounds like a reasonable sort to me. I like him.
I think it was Abe (that, Abe) who said (and if he didn’t say it he should have, and if he didn’t want to say it, then I will) ‘If men and women are going to read all the books in the world to gain wisdom, they ought to start with the Bible to be sure they get what is most important.’
And, I love that Kirky quote. I wish I had said that.
Vivian, can you introduce me to that Bill fellow sometime?
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:15 am
Regarding study vs. service, Claiborne says,
“We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor…. I truly believe that when the poor meet the rich, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.”
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:13 am
But what does Vivian say?
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:49 am
Christians are to love God and love others, and 1 John 3:17-18 says, “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.”
So certainly the ivory tower is not the way to go, but I don’t think an occasional service project is going to cut it either. We need to cultivate an attitude, a lifestyle of service.
Susan, and Claiborne in his book, both referred to Mt. 25:31-46, and as Claiborne said, “I could not help but ask, When all is said and done and the thousands of Christians I was with are gathered before the throne, will we all be with the sheep?”
(Sorry, Bill, but I only quote what resonates with me. But perhaps I feel another post coming on…)
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:25 pm
An important question - when all was said and done, was all really said, and equally important done? Did we follow through on our words? Did we serve.
FWIW, I appreciate the quotes and insights that you bring to these posts. However, I am more interested in what you think.