15 April 2004

Here's me when I'm not blogging Believe it or not, I have other things going on in my life besides blogging. Just wanted to warn you that in a few days time, I return to work, and the blogging -- unless the inspiration just keeps on coming thick and fast -- will probably slow down. I am a teacher, and next week I'll be back among my students. Looking forward to it, actually. I teach Religious Education, a compulsory subject here in the UK. I am actually pretty glad I live in a country that is not afraid to mix religion and public life like that. We don't indoctrinate, and we don't push one religion over another. We just help to open young people's minds to the fact that there are big questions to be answered in life, and that it's fun, rewarding and important to explore those questions with an open mind. And in these times, perhaps more than any other in recent history, we need to educate young people in open-mindedness, tolerance and respect for the different faiths that are out there. So that's what I'll be back to next week. Just wanted to warn you, readers (gosh, it gives me warm fuzzies to think that in just over a week I've already got a wee band of faithful regulars!), that you're being spoiled at the moment. I've had a lot of time on my hands, and it's been fun doing this, but the pace might change a little as of next week. Dave 12:27:48 PM    comment [] What do I do with the book? A couple of days ago, I wrote about my changing relationship to the Bible. I don't know whether I've found a single, coherent system of interpretation to replace the simplistic relationship I once had to the Bible, but I do want to share a couple of thoughts that have been useful to me in reassessing what it means to me. When the Bible stops being an infallible manual for life, what to do with the book? I used to subscribe to the myth that once you reject the belief in inerrancy, you just "throw out the Scriptures," but I know from experience that's not true. It is still to me a holy book that inspires, encourages, teaches and sustains me, a book through which God still speaks and reveals himself. One promising way of looking at the Bible is to see it as a kind of scrapbook of our heritage, a family album. It's a record of the people that went before us. We can't simply disown the characters we find in there, because they're our flesh and blood, our forebears on the spiritual journey. Seen that way, we can't just throw out the Bible, because we'd be denying ourselves, but nor can we read it uncritically. We're looking at our own family history, in all its glory and its shame. The other way of thinking about the Bible, and particularly about the sort of authority -- if any -- it holds for us, is to view it as narrative, and to see ourselves as continuing that story. Or, to broaden that analogy, to see it as the first four acts of a play, of which we are in the fifth act. Let me expound on that by quoting something I wrote elsewhere: Imagine a group of actors come across a new play by William Shakespeare and want to perform it. Also imagine that the fifth act is missing. What are they to do? Shall they simply recycle the previous four acts? Should they just imitate what goes on in the rest of the play? You'd end up with something fairly artless. But imagine they devoured the contents of the first four acts. Picture them getting themselves into the characters, learning every twist and turn of the plot, getting to know the world of the play. Then, rather than allowing act four to be the end of it (and having an incomplete performance), and without merely repeating everything that went before (the whole flow of the play would be lost), imagine that, equipped with their intimate knowledge of the first four acts, they then act out the fifth act in accordance with what went before. If they knew Shakespeare, and, just as importantly, had immersed themselves in the rest of the play, they would be in a position to continue the drama for themselves. That doesn't mean they are allowed to do what they want. They don't have free reign just to make things up and turn the characters and plot this way and that according to their own whims: Their authority is the previous four acts; they must act consistently with everything that went previously; they are accountable to what went before; their actions must make sense in the context of the rest of the story. Here is where the analogy with Scripture comes in: We can use Scripture as a kind of script that we are supposed to follow in detail. Our aim, then, is to duplicate as closely as possible what we see in the Bible. In other words, we recycle the first four acts. In its most extreme form (for example), we don't have electric guitars because the apostles didn't have them, and, after all, we're supposed to be copying them. In a milder form, this kind of view is perhaps the most dominant among conservative believers today: The Bible is a manual, a textbook, an index of rules and guidelines that we are to follow to the letter. [New Testament scholar, NT] Wright, however, proposes we look at it much as the actors looked at the first four acts of Shakespeare's play: Not as a script to be repeated, but as a picture of the story so far. By getting into the world of the story, we learn how we, as believers in Jesus 2000 years on, can live out the same story in our own context. We know we cannot go back to Bible times. More to the point, we don't expect that is what Scripture asks us to do. The story of God's action in the world continues, and we are part of the same story today: Our job is not simply to imitate, but to become part of the drama as it continues to unfold. The Scriptures, the story of Israel, Jesus and the Church, are our guide that keeps us informed of the plot so far. I don't by any means have a full-fledged, systematic way of approaching the Bible. At the risk of sounding all wishy-washy, maybe our relationship to the Bible is so mysterious that we don't really need that. But the above ideas provide some clues as to how I think I approach the Bible nowadays. Dave 12:05:15 PM    comment [] The day the town mouse became a country mouse I always used to say I was a "town person". My ideal home would have been a swish apartment in central London with a balcony overlooking Piccadilly Circus or some similarly bustling place. I just loved the city. The countryside, to be honest, never thrilled me all that much. As a teenage lad, I remember standing on a hill in Wales looking out over a valley, when my (Methodist, back then) youth leader turned to me and said, "And they say there isn't a God?", and I just thought, "Hmm, whatever." Just didn't do anything for me. And then a couple of years ago I did a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. I went to live out in British Columbia, my birthplace, and fell in love with the mountains and the trees and the lakes and the open space. I missed being near the city at first, but little by little it grew on me, and eventually the town mouse was transformed into a country mouse. Couldn't believe the difference when, after almost two years, I returned to England, where my folks and I lived "in the city" (by Canadian standards, anyway) -- here, one block of houses runs into the next block, and one town runs straight into the next. Driving along the highway back from the airport, I kept looking to my right, expecting to see the mountains, but it was just flat for miles and miles. When I got back to my old neighbourhood, all I could see were rooftops. No mountain peaks in the distance. No pine-covered hillsides. It was hard to adjust to. Still is. You know what makes me cry? Or almost cry, anyway. Getting out into the countryside, and something reminds me of British Columbia. And if I close off everything except that little spot where I'm standing, I can almost trick myself into thinking I'm back there, among the mountains and the trees. Usually the effect is spoiled by passing traffic, because anywhere I find a patch of countryside round here is never far from a major highway or motorway. But for a brief moment, sometimes, I can feel I'm back there. Didn't St Augustine (I know, I know, I'm not a particular fan of his either, but he did say one or two interesting things) say something about "memories of Eden"? As human beings we have this yearning for something we've lost, a desire to get back to something we feel should be there, even if we don't know what it is. He said that was a longing for Eden, for a return to God, a longing that was in every human's heart. That's the sort of thing I feel in those moments I've described: Like I've lost something, a part of me almost, and have this intense desire to get it back. I don't know, I guess today I just wanted to share that about BC. I miss it like hell, especially when I'm going through lonesome, frustrating times and want to break out of the cold confines of the city and feel again the freedom of creation. Dave 9:42:25 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 The Grace Pages. Last update: 02/05/04; 01:36:13.