Reading Critically

On the opening evening of our CLM class, I shared some thoughts with the students regarding how to read the material we will be working through.  I think it applies to all of us.  As we read or listen, we should practice critical thinking.  This doesn’t mean thinking that criticizes, but instead thinking that involves being open-minded - using judgement and discipline to process what we are learning about without letting our own personal bias or opinion detract from the arguments. 

 

In other words, be open minded – one thought is that is we read or hear something we don’t agree with, apply Wesley’s quadrilateral – analyze it in the light of Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience.

 

For example, I was reading one of the books we are using in class, and the author suggested that all reading during worship should be done from a well bound, hard back Bible.  I don’t want to just dismiss something I disagree with, so I stopped to think about it.    That’s not a biblical command.  It probably does apply to the author’s tradition, but maybe not to mine.  I often see younger people reading in church from their iPhones.  My reason tells me that is an adaption to the modern culture, and my experience with the Holy Spirit tells me that it is more loving to be inclusive than exclusive – why criticize what people read from in church when the loving action is to be grateful for the sharing of the scripture. 

 

Don’t dismiss something just because you disagree with it, but also don’t accept what you read as rules that must not be broken.  Read critically.

 

Sanctifying Grace: Suspend Belief

This is the fourth post in a series about finding sanctifying grace in the Bible instead of using it for our own purposes.  Some of the content of these posts is from the International Bible Series based on a lesson I taught at our Annual Conference this year.

This is a quote from Thomas Steagald:

Reading scripture, especially familiar scripture, calls us to “suspend belief,” set aside presumed clear and simple meaning, at least until the text should if it does, teach us that particular meaning again. Of course, it may not.”

We are so familiar with the passages of scripture that before we even start studying, we think we know what the passage is about. This quote calls us to suspend that belief – to open our hearts and minds to hear the scripture anew, and to allow God to lead us to whatever understanding we are called to hear.

We talked about parables in yesterday's post; they were told by Jesus in order to move the hearer into active thought – to question what they thought they knew. Parables can do the same for us if we allow them to, and can help us in the never ending job of discernment. Going back to William Barclay – he says that parables can reveal truth to those who want to see it, and it conceals truth from those who do not wish to see it.

I think that sometimes we are so entrenched in what we have been taught, in what we already think, that we are afraid to listen to God through the passage anew, because, heaven forbid, God might be saying something to us to challenge what we know, or to move us to a new, better, deeper understanding. But do we want that? If we don't, then I think we will never hear God in scripture - we will only hear ourselves.

In other words, a parable, or Bible study, can be means of grace – sanctifying grace – a way for God to transform us, and help us to grow – if we allow them to be.

Sanctifying Grace: Form

This is the third post in a series about finding sanctifying grace in the Bible instead of using it for our own purposes.  Some of the content of these posts is from the International Bible Series based on a lesson I taught at our Annual Conference this year.

 

Literary form is important. For example, if I read to you the poem by Maya Angelo called “I know why the caged bird sings” then, knowing it is poem, and that a poem has meaning beyond the words themselves, you would know its not really about the bird – it’s about the truth that the poem tells us. Bible study is the same. Bible text come to us in a literary form. There are lots of forms – sermon, genealogy, proverb, allegory, prayer, song. Knowing the literary form, we know know more about what the author was telling us.

If you were in English class, and the teacher asked you to write a paper based on an assigned reading, wouldn't knowing the literary form be important to your examination of the assignment? Would you write the same paper on Angelo's poem if you thought it was a historical document? We need to give the Bible the same respect we would provide to an English assignment.

To dig that concept down deeper, I'm going to focus on the literary form known as a parable. Parable literally means to “throw beside” or “to compare.” Jesus wasn’t the only person in the bible who told parables. Think back to Nathan, the prophet, who went to David and told him the story of a lamb – favorite pet of a farmer. The lamb grew up with the family – it was like another family member. A rich man comes and seizes the precious lamb. David is outraged until Nathan explains that he (David) is that rich man in his dealing with Bathsheba and her husband. A parable – a story that in and of itself may be not true – but it leads to truth. There is truth in it, and that is what is important.

CH Dodd, a new testament scholar, said this about parables: “At its simplest, the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” I love that – “to tease our minds into active thought.”

William Barclay says that a parable begins with the everyday – with what people understand, and leads them to things they do not understand and to open their eyes to that which they did not see before.

Extrapolating from that example, we don't read a parable to learn what the farmer did. We read the parable to learn the message Jesus was telling those who were listening - the Truth. And then we ask God how that Truth can be applied in our own context and our own world.  

Now I'm going to walk on shakier ground, but if you've come this far, maybe you'll come a little farther with me. Think about the first chapters of Genesis. What is this literary form? Is it history? Or is it something else? If it is history, then the seven days are seven days, and there is no evolution, and the world is less that 5000 years old. But if these chapters are something other than history - perhaps origin stories - then what we can hear from them is that God was the God at the beginning, and that God created and loved all. We learn that we belong to God, and that we have been given dominion over the world, to care for it. The number of days isn't important. The Creator is. The Truth we read can be applied to the world we see around us, without us ignoring or rationalizing away the facts in front of us.

Literary form is important, and it can lead us to Truth.

Sanctifying Grace: Context

This is the second post in a series about finding sanctifying grace in the Bible instead of using it for our own purposes.  Some of the content of these posts is from the International Bible Series based on a lesson I taught at our Annual Conference this year.

1. I firmly believe that context is important.  If I said to you that the Cardinals battled the Pirates to the bitter end, you might make a guess as to what I was talking about. The truth is, I could be telling you a story about Roman priests fighting with actual pirates, or I could be relating the results of a baseball game to you. You don’t know if you don’t know the context. The same is true of Bible Study.

As you are reading a passage, ask yourself, or find out:

• To whom was the passage written? Was the author of the passage speaking to a particular issue in that culture?
• How does that setting "color" what has been written? For example, when reading about the food laws in the Old Testament, is it important to know about the people and their circumstances? I think it might be.
• What issues were being addressed in that audience? When Paul says that women shouldn't speak in worship and should go home and ask their husbands, what role does context play? Is he writing a law? Or is he speaking in a particular city to a particular group of people dealing with a particular issue?

In addition to the external context, think about where the scripture itself sits in The Bible.  So often we do not do this. We lift passages out of context and look at them as if nothing came before and nothing comes after.  If you read a parable, look at the chapter it is in. What was happening at the time? What other parables are near the one you are reading? How do those parables round out the message of your particular passage? Looking back at our previous list, knowing where the passage is placed in the Bible can help you understand who Jesus is speaking to, what issue he is addressing, and what else he has to say on the same topic.

Without context, we can really misinterpret scripture, and lifting a passage out of context is a dangerous thing to do.

Why be Careful with Scripture?

If you are reading this Blog, I imagine, although I do not know for certain, that you spend some time reading the Bible. Or that you are in church, and you hear sermons preached, based on scripture. I hope that you will agree with me that it is important to do either of those tasks carefully. I taught Sunday school at Annual Conference this year. As part of the lesson, I talked about this subject.  Since I so much believe that this is an important topic for all of us to consider, I'm going to use this week on the blog to expand on that part of the lesson. 

Why do we need to be careful with how we interpret scripture and apply it to our lives? We are not here to use the Bible to support what we believe, but instead to hear the living word of God as spoken to us through scirpture, and to allow that grace of us God to shape the way we believe. So many people in history have used the Bible to support un-God-like and unholy beliefs and have used the Bible to hurt people, to bring harm, and un-gracefilled judgment. Think of slave-holders who used the Bible to oppress the people they believed they owned. Think of those who used the Bible to prevent women from reaching their God-given potential or who used the Bible to force women to stay in physically or mentally harmful homes (and who still do). Think of those who use the Bible to say that those among us who are hungry or homeless deserve what they get and who should not be helped. 

How do we NOT do that? How do we read the gift that has been given to us as a way for God to speak to us? We'll explore that as we go.

 

Feel free to share you thoughts in the comments.

Intellectual Sloth

From William Barclay:  "The New Testament scholar E.F Scott said that religion is far more than merely the strenuous exercise of the intellect, but that nonetheless a very great part of religious failure is due to nothing other than intellectual sloth. To fail to think things out is in itself a sin."

Do you ever - I know I do - quote a piece of scripture because it fits the situation in which you are in? Do you use scripture to support your belief - either because you've been taught that what you are quoting has a particular meaning or because it just fits your own opinion? I think we do that.

I think we don't look for ourselves. We don't take the time and effort to pull out the Bible and study, not only the chapter and verse, but also the surrounding chapters - even the surrounding books. We don't take the time to explore the people to whom the scripture was written, and their circumstances, or the geography of the place in which the listener stood.

I truly believe that the Bible is a living book that contains the word of God that God wants us to hear. It can reveal some of the nature of God. But it's not easy. It requires effort and work.

I believe that Jesus is the revelation of God, and we would do well to allow Jesus' light to shine on all of the scripture we are trying to understand - even the verses that are credited to Jesus. We need to look at all of it in the revelation Jesus provides so that we can more fully (and correctly) understand it.  The Word is the word.

My worry with those who say they "take the bible literally" (and I don't mean everyone who does) is that they haven't really read it for themselves, and haven't given it the strenuous exercise of intellect necessary to understand it. And my worry is that they (and we) are not listening to the living presence of God in our lives when we lift out a verse and use it as a proof of our own thoughts and opinions.

We do that, don't we?

Rumbling with the Bible

I want to take Brene Brown's concept of rumbling with the stories we tell ourselves (in Rising Strong) one step further. A couple of years ago, a pastor was teaching a Bible Toolbox class at church. One of the techniques was to look for the gaps in Bible stories. What is it we do not know when we read the story? What facts are left out? 

To take that even further, what about bible study? What "stories do we make up" about what we read, and what does that tell us about who WE are rather than what the original meaning was? What is God telling us about what the story means to us when we realize what we have used to fill in the gaps of the story?

Someone was teaching Sunday school a few weeks ago. He said (and he was quoting the resource he was using) that Mary's parents sent her away to visit her cousin Elizabeth because they were ashamed of her, and needed to get her away from their community. He said it as if it were a fact, but the Bible doesn't say that. I think that the writer of the resource assumed that because that would have been something that might have happened in his community in the past. We lay our experiences on the story.

When the rich man walks away, sad, after Jesus tells him to sell all he has and follow him, we assume he didn't do it. In fact, we state it as a fact that he walked away, leaving Jesus behind. It doesn't say that.

There are lots of examples of those kinds of gaps that we fill in with our own preconceptions and with what we have been taught, assuming it to be truth. 

We need to struggle with our interpretation of gaps. We need to find them, and examine them, and discover what it is about ourselves that leads us to fill in the gaps, JUST THAT WAY. That can tell us about ourselves.

More than that, I think looking at what we add to the stories can be a way we discover what God is trying to tell us through the stories. It can be a type of Bible study to open our minds to the gaps in the story and discover how we fill them in, and what God is telling us about the assumptions we make. We can learn more about ourselves, and more about God by rumbling with these stories.

Child-like Faith: Read Scriptures

Reading Scriptures doesn't seem like it would be a characteristic of a Child-like faith, but think about children. Do they have a "show me" kind of attitude? There is an innate curiosity in a child.

Our son Josh used to ask questions ALL THE TIME. And I mean, ALL THE TIME. Where are we going? What are we doing? What are you fixing for dinner? Where is Dad? When will he be back? On and on. He had an incredible curiosity.

Do you have that kind of curiosity about the Bible? Do I? Do we yearn to read what it says for ourselves? So often, we take other people's word for what the Bible says. It's possible that there are times when we aren't very energetic about open the book and reading the story for ourselves. We listen to the sermon, we listen to the Sunday school lesson, and we take it for fact. We lack that child-like curiosity to see for ourselves and to ask our own questions of the text.

God speaks to each of us differently through the scriptures. That's why it's called the living word. Get curious, and read it for yourself. I'll try to do the same.

Into the Story

One of my best experiences of Bible Study has been my participation in a Disciple class.  I loved the in depth study of scripture and the commitment to read and work together to learn the message in the words.  Great experience.

One of the "take aways" from that class has been that we learned several tools to use to explore the depth of the Word.  One of them was to ask the question, "Which character in the story are you?"  In other words, can you place yourself in the story?

I thought of that this morning as I read from Hamilton's Not a Silent Night.  The chapter I'm reading is based on the story of Jesus in the Temple.  His parents leave town, and he isn't with them. Hamilton tells of a time that he and his wife accidentally left their 6 year old in a Disney Store at Disney World as they headed into the park.  The story ended well (thank goodness), but it gives him a special affinity to the story of Mary and Joseph rushing back to find Jesus.

How can you allow your experiences to pull you deeper into the story?  I wrote a day or two ago about the biases we bring to scripture.  It's true, so let's use them to move closer to God, all the time aware of what we are doing.

Not in a Vacuum

On Sunday evening, we talked about the idea that everyone interprets the Bible.  No one is able to just read it.  We all place our own biases on it when we read; it's impossible not to do that.  Knowing we do that is important, however.  If we are aware that our reading of the Bible is done through our selves - our biases and beliefs, our experiences and opinions - then we can watch for them.

Knowing that makes us more willing to listen to other people's thoughts concerning the scripture. How are they different from our own?  Could that difference somehow be related to our biases? What does the difference say to us?  To them?

In the same way, we interpret the world around us through our own biases.  Haven't you ever seen or heard a comment someone has made, and been certain you know what that person is talking about, only to find out that you were completely wrong?  Haven't you seen someone else do this?  I have. We need to be aware that our conclusions are not always - if ever - based in just fact.  Our thoughts and feelings are never formed in a vacuum.

Roots and Storms

Take a look at the picture to the left.  Do you see the palm tree roots, just hanging up in the air?  The sand around them has been eroded away, and all that is there are the roots, dangling in the air.

The tree is standing high up in the air, as if it is firmly grounded.  I wonder, though, when the next storm comes through or the next hurricane, even, if the tree will still be standing.

Is that an analogy for our lives?  Do we sometimes kid ourselves, believing that we are firmly grounded, when in reality, our situation is tremulous, as best.  When the storms come and then go, will we still be standing?

My goal in Lent is to return to firmer ground through study and devotionals.  My hope is that I will read every day, and that my roots will be prompted to grow deeper and stronger.   And whether there is a storm or not, I hope I end up more firmly rooted in God.

Practice

A list of random thoughts:

1. I would like to participate in an in-depth Bible study, but none is being offered at my church.  I wish it were being offered.
2. I am trying to do some study on my own, but I lack focus and determination to get it done.  If I want it so badly, it seems that I should be able to do it.
3. Is part of the problem a lack of community as I do it alone?  Probably.
4. A sermon last week has prompted me to pick up daily devotional reading again.  It's hard to get up in the morning early enough to do it. 
5. I like doing it, but I also like sleeping.  I wonder if getting into the routine of it will make it less difficult.

At the church where I was this Sunday, the young adult leading the children's moment explained the necessity of practicing for spiritual growth.  She told them she really wanted to juggle, and then she showed them how, in spite of her desire, she had no ability.  "Why not?"  she asked.  "Practice!" the kids explained to her.

Practice.

Through the idea of God

The view out my office window this morning -- snow!

I was writing yesterday about expectations, and how we make God in the image of our expectations, instead of allowing God to make us into his own image, into the potential he created us to be (in his image).

This morning as I read another piece of Bishop Schnase's book (Five Practices of Fruitful Living), I was struck by this:

The fruit of Intentional Faith Development is not merely to know more about God but to know God, to see through the idea of God to God himself. (underlined emphasis mine)

Have you ever had that experience of Bible study?  I wonder if that  describes those Ah Hah moments we all sometimes have -- those times when a piece of God's word, either read from scripture or spoken to us by someone else, or ... and the list goes on -- but those times when God's word finds root in our lives, and allows us to see God, not our idea of God.

Are those the times when God is able to change us, to re-create us?

Renewal of our Minds

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:1-2

This was the scriptural basis of the sermon today.

It's a great scripture. Offer everything you are -- yourself as a living sacrifice to God.

What does it mean to be transformed by the renewing of your mind?

There are times -- most of the time, actually -- when I yearn for Bible study. I crave it, and when I am able to participate in it, I bask in it. I soak it in, like a sponge does water. It changes how I view the world; it changes my faith and my formation in it. It's important.

I don't believe, though, that transformation of the mind is solely an intellectual pursuit. I wonder if transformation of the mind involves allowing God to change how we see the world, how we interpret what is happening around us. I wonder if perhaps renewal of our minds means that we set aside our preconceptions and allow God to reorder our view -- how our mind works.

God transforms. I think it is necessary for us to place ourselves in an accepting attitude, but we can't do the transformation. Study will help -- it will open our minds to God's work, but the change itself is God's work in us.

We offer our bodies -- and our minds -- to God, as a living sacrifice.

Microview

Do you ever get the feeling, when you are involved in bible study or Sunday school classes, that the conclusions which are being reached are just too easy? Too one-dimensional? Too much based on one piece of scripture and not on the whole of the Bible?

Sometimes, looking at one passage of scripture, the conclusions can seem obvious, but even so, won’t feel right.

I was reading a post on the United Methodist Reporter blog, but it was a couple of the comments which caught my attention.

• One of them proposes that there is wisdom and truth in the idea that the book of Ecclesiastes follows Proverbs. “Proverbs is full of great, practical wisdom: be frugal, be diligent, be honest, don't run around on your wife, and you'll live a long and happy life….Turn the page, and Ecclesiastes says, "You know all that stuff about how your virtuous efforts will pay off? Fuhgeddaboutit." Life isn't fair. Stuff happens.” The truth is, we know that both of these are true – we know that there are positive consequences to good decisions, as much as we know that sometimes “stuff” happens, even when we’ve done everything “right.” The truth is that we need both books in order to understand that. Conclusions drawn from just one of them will be too one-dimensional. Life is more complicated than that.
• Another commenter suggested that Romans and James were a combination that offered truth together. Some might say that Paul and James are in opposition to each other, but this writer believes that the two letters do not contradict each other, but that they approach the idea of faith and works just with different emphases, depending on the errors of their audiences. Both are a look at the truth.

I think one of the traps of studying the bible is that our angle of vision can become too narrow. We look at the word of God with a microview. I think that we must listen to those nagging doubts we have, and that we should always ask ourselves the question, “Does this conclusion, based on this one verse, even as perfect as it seems, fit in with what I have learned about God from the entire Bible?” Don’t belittle that question, because it’s important, and it leads to truth.

Context

Take a look at these two images. They are of the same type of flowers, perhaps even on the same tree. They were taken the same day, in the same light, by the same photographer (me) using the same camera. What is the difference between them?

It is the background. The out of focus, unimportant background makes all of the difference in the two images. In one, the white flowers and the light sky behind the "focus" of the image has no contrast with the white flowers. In the second one, the pink flowers behind the white ones, even out of focus, make the the subject of the image just POP. We can see the white flowers -- their outlines, edges, shapes, etc, because of the pink ones.

In photography and in Bible study, context matters. It occurred to me, as I looked through these images, once again how true that fact is.

In Bible study, the context of the verse -- it's surrounding information, the person who wrote the passage, the audience to whom it was written, the needs of the people hearing the message, the culture of the time -- all of those facts, even though out of focus, and not the subject of the study, are important. Without them, we will miss what is right in front of our eyes. We will not see that upon which we are focused because the background is important.



Images: Both were taken in our park yesterday.