The last post got me thinking more about scripture. I love spending time immersed in scripture, meditating, reflecting and applying it to creative writing. At the same time I'm bothered by terminology such as " inerrant " and " infallible ". Looking back down the corridor of history, and through our lens of understanding, such words may have fit. Where we are at now in the corridor, they don't work. I would see them more as obstacles, obstructing the vision ahead.
But, don't get me wrong. I still see myself as within the safe boundaries of swimming in scripture, I haven't gone beyond the safety buoys heading for open water. I see scripture as Truth. If DNA is the building blocks of life, inside scripture is the story of life of such profound truth that we catch glimpses of. In it, really is the meaning of life, our understanding of God...and of ourselves. It is a profound, mysterious truth that has to be comprehended with mind, heart, soul and spirit. But, more, to often it is a truth that has to be discovered by living it. I love these words from 1 John 4:16...
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.
Here, there are levels of truth. I can know God like some friends on Facebook, I've never met them, they ask for conformation of friendship and it never evolves beyond a written text. There is a level of truth, but, it never evolves to a deeper relationship where I experience God in His story, and God experiences me in my story. Through the reality of a living relationship I experience a deeper level of truth. The truth is I don't know God, unless I love. If I love, I live in God, and God lives in me. That is profound truth that stretches the human imagination. Now, I could say that to someone and they might believe it. But, if I say it, and say come hang out with me and live those words out...that depth of truth will likely speak with far more clarity than my words.
I also think there is a danger when we read scripture to personalize it, making me the center of the story, and have it orbit around me. I think we greatly reduce it's truth when we edit it to daily life applications. The gravity that holds everything together is the story of sin, redemption, a new creation. We need to let that gravity pull us into the story, and we need to live out that story. That is a truth we need to constantly search for.
As I've said many times before, " scripture is a precious gem." It's something each one of us can hold in hand. It is something that is filled with different angles. It is beautiful, in that light which appears white, is filled with a spectrum of color and when it hits scripture we see it's truth. We can read the same scripture numerous times holding it at different angles and see something different. Even as we read scripture the light can reflect and refract. We need to let scripture read us also, to ask, what does it demand of us. We need to wrestle with it. Maybe we'll walk away with limp, humbled by beauty, truth and mystery.
Scripture also changes how we see, it shapes our vision. William Blake said: “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” Yes, and a Christian sees not the same world that a non-Christian sees. We see “Easter in the ordinary” (Nicholas Lash), the world transformed by grace, generously sprinkled with signs of God’s coming kingdom. It is on the basis of this imaginative vision that we are called to think differently and act differently, called to radical discipleship in which we begin to live tomorrow’s life today.
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