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.