Saturday, May 12, 2012

The Bible?  Isn't it a love story, after all?

-- Pittman McGehee

I might as well venture out into the deep waters of biblical interpretation with this new "friend" I've never met, David Dark, the author of The Sacred Art of Questioning Everything.

I'm going to venture out into these deep and sometimes stormy waters because he has brought up how we interpret the Bible in this, the 7^th chapter of his book, a chapter entitled "Survival of the Freshest:  Questioning Interpretations."

First, though, I have to tell you that I love the Bible.

I don't like to argue about it, but I love to teach it, study it, learn about it, savor it.

For my entire adult life, I've been a curriculum writer for adult Bible studies.  Every week, I facilitate what I call "relational Bible studies" for adult men and women in my church and other churches.  I love the stories of the Bible.  I love the truths contained within it, and I love discovering yet another thing I didn't know about this sacred text.  I also love it when something I thought I knew for sure turns out to be an incomplete knowledge.

I live with the idea, like old Saul-who-became-Paul, that we all -- every single one of us -- sees through a glass darkly, and I love it when some old prejudice or blind spot is removed and I can see more clearly than I saw before.

As I teach, I teach with the idea that it's not my job to bang people over the head with my favorite idea about some issue or with my indocrination about the Bible.  It is my job to hold the text with tender hands and an open heart, to offer what I see and what I think with love and with respect for my students, my beloved travelers on the journey of faith.  When I teach the Bible, I feel as if I am standing on holy ground, but so are my students; we are on the journey of discovery together.

What Dark writes on p. 148 makes me smile and serves as a good beginning:  "We're prone to speak beyond what we know, to overdo it, as if what we have to say and decree is more than interpretation, more than just humans trying to make sense of things.  We want to come off as successful and informed.  Despite the biblical injunction against oaths and excess verbiage, we lay it on thick.  We're part of the put-on."

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

There are no facts, only interpretations, and this too is an interpretation.

--Friedrich Nietzsche,

-The Sacredness of Questioning Everything,by David Dark, p. 147

This 7^th chapter of David Dark's book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, is my favorite.   I've covered every page with my yellow-highlighter.   I could respond on this blog to every section.  I love it.

And I am grateful for it.

I have some bad memories of speaking about something and having someone say, "Well, that's just your opinion," and I'm betting I'm not the only one who has had that humiliating moment.

It's a great way to take the floor back, isn't it?  It's a great way to wield power control and manipulation.  It's a proven way to put others down and lift yourself up, but.....is it really?

"That's just your interpretation," someone said to me in response to a statement I'd made recently.   Instantly, I shut my mouth, shut him out, shut down.  Sometimes, when I've met with that response, I've even shut the door to my heart.

Friday, April 20, 2012

And the limits of our language are, in some sense, the limits of our lifeworld.

-- David Dark,The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, p. 131

"Can you say that another way?"

I'll never forget the first time someone asked me that question, and I will always wonder if he asked me because he wanted clarity for himself or because he wanted me to clarify what I was saying for my own sake.

Later - much later - I realized that I was coming from a place of judgment instead of a place of love.   With my words I was shutting down possibilities and binding myself and others in locked, fixed, hardened positions.

My listener was inviting me to push beyond the limits judgment imposes and walk around the experience long enough to catch a glimpse of something bigger and more mysterious within the very experience I was attempting to confine.  He wanted me to unstick myself from my own stuck place, to walk into the wider world of expansiveness, openness, possibility.

And why was I trying to lock something down with my judgment?

It's such an easy answer:  I was afraid, and something in me believed that if I nailed it down with a label or a pronouncement, I could manage it.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Today I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Allen Verhey speak at the annual Christian Life Commission conference in Dallas.   Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School, Dr. Verhey spoke profoundly on the topic of "Remembering Jesus:  The Bible, The Community and the Moral Life."

Repeatedly in his lecture, Dr. Verhey stressed the importance of staying in conversation about important issues and especially about issues that are complex, difficult and potentially divisive.  It is, he said, essential that we stay in conversation with each other within faith communities.  It is the way we learn from each other.  It is the way we are correctives to each other, and conversation is the way we build community.

Tomorrow he will deliver a lecture entitled "Remembering Jesus in a World of Sickness and Suffering."

In my last blog post, Questioning Everything 5", I reflected on Chapter 5, "The Power of the Put-On: Questioning Media" from David Dark's book that has captivated my interest, provoked a lot of reflection and spurred some dialogue among friends and blog readers.