BIG, PLAIN, RICH TRUTHS
What is “sunrise”? It’s when the sun first appears over the horizon as the result of the earth spinning on its axis. This is true and we’re glad. But that isn’t “sunrise”! GK Chesterton would say: Sunrise is when God says to the sun, ‘Get up!’ GKC liked dictionaries but he knew they had real limits. They reduce everything to bare definitions but we’re not to criticize them for that—they’re doing the best they can.
There’s a habit of thinking that reduces so much. We can be carried away with information, explanation, definition and cognitive, rational instruction. We need information, don’t you know, but it’s too bad when we allow information to limit our vision to the dictionary or a grammar or even a pursuit of correctness.
Ask Jesus about that field of flowers and he’d say, “Beautiful isn’t it! Solomon in all his grandeur never looked that good. My Father clothed that field.” He goes onto say that before you know it the flowers will wither and be burned and yet the Father never tires of pouring out such glory. How gloriously generous He is in his giving.
Jesus would look at sparrows and speak of his Father’s generous and faithful provision. He’d pass a woman adding yeast to her dough and he’d think of his Father’s kingdom and say something like, “Remind me to look at this on our way back.” He’d see tired oxen with ill-fitting yokes that rubbed their necks raw, dragging a plough up and down, up and down, up and down a field and donkeys, heads down and burdens up to the sky on their backs. He sees them and thinks of the burdens of people and how he had come to deliver them and wishes they'd come to him. He looks up into the limitless heavens and sees them as his Holy Father’s “theater of glory”. Everything he saw, even the sadness and hurt of the world, made him think and speak of and act for his Father and his Father’s eternal purpose.
I’m for exegesis; I’m for the use of grammars, lexicons, literary models, sociological insights, hermeneutical approaches—or anything else within my reach and competence—that help us to grasp the meaning of a text, section or book. Of course! But all the Bible study, however rich in technique and however successful in getting at “authorial intent”—if it doesn’t lead us to the massive subtext that lies beneath all the verses and all the books, if it doesn’t open out eyes to life and all there is and help us to see as Jesus saw, it’s worse than wasted time [note John 5:39]. I don’t say I know very well how to gain such insight much less that I have gained it to a marked degree. But I know as sure as I live that I know the kind of writing or speaking that doesn’t carry us there.
I’ve seen more than one lovely young person carried away by scholarship, seduced by literary and philosophical conundrums; left close to speechlessness. Well, at least, left not knowing what to do with the biblical witness to feed the people of God. Every text and even the Bible itself, becomes problematic; every biblical claim has to be rigidly scrutinized in the heady realm of academia before the scholar can make use of it for Church-feeding—especially in the presence of his scholarly peers. And while they talk to each other the People of God starve [or are left to the ceaseless and banal moralizing that passes for Church-feeding or to the rigidly religious with their exhaustive blueprints, slide-rules and books on logic placed in the church pews for the listeners to become acquainted with].
One of the leading gurus of a generation or two ago, one who specialized in the biblical Wisdom literature, ended up believing in virtually nothing distinctively Hebrew/Christian though his understanding of OT biblical texts is still highly regarded. Sigh! We can end up “correct” or seriously seeking to be and end up clinically depressed or without convictions or hope—ceaselessly on the probe for intellectual consistency and "integrity"; worshiping at the shrine of the godess, Knowing All.
We all begin with some “givens”; with convictions we take as the foundation of whatever we’re going to build on them. Everyone does! There's no getting to a place where we can prove beyond debate and with “geometrical certainty” what we believe. The ceaseless search for indisputable truth is a losing game. God hasn't left us in the dark or short of truth and there's something sinister about our insatiable hunger to make our claims academically respectable.
Look for, ask people to help you find, ask God to provide the help you need to find the big, plain, rich truths the Bible offers and makes much of. Find those, purposing to throw in the stubborn ounces of your weight into God’s glorious and loving purpose toward humanity and cheerfully march on under the banner of Jesus Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment