Changing the World

No doubt you’ve all seen them at book stores. There’s one for just about everything—computers to cooking, gardening to gambling, the stock market to the local market. I’m talking about the “Idiot” books and the “For Dummy” books. We love those books. They get to the point. They don’t waste our time with a lot of theory, long stories that all too often seem to miss the point. They tell us what we need to know—how to make that stupid “error” message go away on our computer screen—and that’s it. They make life easier, not more complex.

The Bible, though, is different. It’s not a “how to” book. It’s not an “owner’s manual.” It definitely has a way of making things more complex—much more complex. David called it a lamp to his feet, and a light to his path. A lamp illuminates. A light shines. They allow us to see what could not be seen otherwise. They help us see things differently.

The Bible is not so much a “Life for Dummies” kind of book, a manual that helps us through life so we can get to heaven. Rather it is a book that challenges us to change our perspectives. It’s a book that dares us to be different, a book that provokes us to transform our world. As Will Willimon says, “From Scripture, the church is given more than directives, rules, codes for contemporary Christian behavior, The main gift of Scripture is a world, a culture, a reality constructed (as all worlds, cultures, and reality are fabricated) through words. Words make the world.”

Theologian George Linbeck says that in the Bible we engage a complex redescription of reality. He says that when we read God’s word we are to put our “reality” within the “scriptural framework rather than translating Scripture into extrascriptural categories” (which fundamentalist tend to do). He says “It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text.”

Anyway, I think I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked (sorry). The point I think I’m trying to make is how we approach Scripture makes a world a difference in how Scripture affects us and our world. We need to approach God’s word as if we were opening a package that contained a ticking time bomb. It’s full of complexity and mystery. It pulls us into its world. It challenges us with a “strange new world,” one that is wild and unpredictable, one full of grace and boundless mercy. And then it sends us back into our world. But we come back with a whole new perspective, a “redescription of reality.” And this new scriptural framework slowly absorbs our world, recreating it according to God’s word. The kingdom of God has come near. And nothing will be the same.

I've been thinking a lot about Karl Bath’s essay “The Strange New World within the Bible.” I've been thinking about this whole notion of unleashing our ideas of God, Jesus, and the Bible.

You see, by reducing the Bibles to a source of propositions we have chained God. In his essay Barth talks about how we can find most anything we want in the Bible. If we look for history, it is there. If we look for morality, it is there. If we look for religion, it is there. If we seek to defend a certain from of religion, or worship, or whatever, we can find the ammunition to arm ourselves with all the propositional firepower we need to defend our position and defeat all other positions (except, of course, they too have armed themselves and fight just as sure of their version of the truth as we are). The point for Barth is there is something more contained in the Bible. The problem is, in Barth words, “we measure God with our own measure, we conceive God with our own conceptions, we wished ourselves a God according to our own wishes.”

I think that’s part of Paul is warning Timothy about when he says that “the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths” (2 Timothy 4.3-4). We tend to think of this piece as talking to heresies and “vain philosophies of the world.” And certainly it does. But I also think that it addresses the issue we face today with folks thinking their idea of truth is the Truth. I think it has to do with the tendency for religious folks to build their doctrinal fortresses around propositional proof-texts, thinking somehow they have defended God and truth when in fact all they have done is put a leash on God. I think part of what Paul is saying is there is a wildness to God that makes us uncomfortable. So our tendency is to want to tame that wildness, put a muzzle on the bite in the Bible, and control the Spirit.

Personally I think that is the great flaw of many fundamentalist movements of the church—especially here in America. They have gathered around themselves preachers who are willing to scratch their itchy ears. Not so much in the sense that they have “watered down the gospel,” or they are preaching a “prosperity gospel,” but in the sense that the Truth of the Bible is reduced to truths (or propositions about truths) about the Bible that can be codified and defended. Preaching the wildness of God is replaced by defenses of propositions. For many, the itching ear that needs to be scratched is the right human thought about God—as they define it.

Here’s where Barth really helps. In a brilliant piece from his essay, Barth says:

It is not the right human though about God which forms the content of the Bible, but the right divine thoughts about men. The Bible tells us not how we should talk with God but what he says to us; not how we find the way to him, but how he has sought and found the way to us; not the right relation in which we must place ourselves to him, but the covenant which he has make with all who are Abraham’s spiritual children and which he has sealed once and for all in Jesus Christ.

When we forget that it all begins and ends with God, we begin to tame the wildness of God. When we begin to think that it is how we think about God that is important and not how God thinks about us, we begin to develop an itch and go looking for someone to scratch it (maybe that’s why there’s so much church hopping in our modern world). When we begin to think that we need to find a way to God, and loose sight of the fact that it is God who has already made a way toward us, we drift away from grace. When we begin to think that somehow our faith (and ultimately our salvation) is synergistic, we have caged God, putting God on display in our churches.