About the Bible

Short Answers to Big Questions
A Helpful Resource Revised and Expanded

Answers? Perhaps. Responses? Yes. Earlier this month Augsburg Books released a revised and expanded edition of Terence E. Fretheim's About the Bible: Short Answers to Big Questions. I have personally benefited from the first edition and have recommended it to many friends and family members. This welcomed revision provides a highly accessible resource for laity, pastors, students, and general inquisitors concerning pervasive questions with respect to the Bible. Two of the additional questions addressed in this edition include: "Did God create the world good and not perfect?" and "Does God cause natural disasters in the Bible?" While the questions in this volume are not ones that all have asked, I would submit that all who think about the Bible deal with some formulation of these questions to an extent, and to that end, this collection of responses is pertinent.

http://www.augsburgfortress.org/store/item.jsp?clsid=196246&productgroupid=0&isbn=0806657677

The Prophetic Imagination

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity. And that is true among liberals who are too chic to remember and conservatives who have overlaid the faith memory with all kinds of hedges that smack of scientism and Enlightenment.

It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface. That is, the prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.

Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, pg.2.

Holistic Vision of All Life

For Africans, the salvation of individuals is no substitute for the complete salvation of the entire human condition. The African person is not an individual, for personality is defined by relationship. The African does not reflect the ideology that says, "I think; therefore I am." Rather, for Africans, their reality is expressed by the saying, "I am, because we are; and because we are, I am." Nor do humans as community live their lives in splendid isolation from the rest of creation. Rather, there is an intrinsic relationship among sky, humans, and earth - and authentic human living is at the harmonious intersection of these three interdependent realms. Human beings cannot be fully saved unless the co-determinates of authentic human life are simultaneously saved. In this regard, Revelation reinforces the African worldview, for Revelation envisions a future not of isolated individuals but of a community living in the holy city and nurtured by the river of life and the tree of life.

James Chukwuma Okoye, "Power and Worship: Revelation in African Perspective," in From Every People and Nation, ed. David Rhoads, pg. 122

Amos 5 KBV

“I hate, I despise your lectures and seminars, your sermons, addresses and Bible studies…When you display your hermeneutic, dogmatic, ethical and pastoral bits of wisdom before one another and before me, I have no pleasure in them…Take away from me your…thick books and…your dissertations…your theological magazines, monthlies and quarterlies.”

Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology, pg. 120

Prayer of St. Patrick

Christ, be with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise,
Christ in the heart of every one who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every one who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
Salvation is of the Lord,
Salvation is of the Lord,
Salvation is of the Christ,
May your salvation, O Lord, be ever with us.

St. Patrick, 389-461

Oxford Book of Prayer, pg 129

Suffering

Lord, comfort the sick, the hungry
the lonely and those who are hurt and shut in on themselves,
by your presence in their hearts;
use us to help them in a practical way.
Show us how to set about this
and give us strength, tact and compassion.
Teach us how to be alongside them,
and how to share in their distress deeply in our prayer.
Make us open to them and give us courage to suffer with them,
and that in so doing we share with you in the suffering of the world
for we are your body on earth and you work through us.

Michael Hollings and Etta Gullick

Oxford Book of Prayer, pg 130

Creating God, Your Fingers Trace

Creating God, your fingers trace
the bold designs of farthest space;
let sun and moon and stars and light
and what lies hidden praise your might.

Sustaining God, your hands uphold
earth's mysteries known or yet untold;
let water's fragile blend with air,
enabling life, proclaim your care.

Redeeming God, your arms embrace
all now despised for creed or race;
let peace, descending like a dove,
make known on earth your healing love.

Indwelling God, your gospel claims
one family with a billion names;
let every life be touched by grace
until we praise you face to face.

Words: Jeffery Rowthorn
Words © 1979 by The Hymn Society

Long Loneliness #2

"I clung to the words of comfort in the Bible and as long as the light held out, I read and pondered. Yet all the while I read, my pride was fighting on. I did not want to go to God in defeat and sorrow. I did not want to depend on Him. I was like the child that wants to walk by itself, I kept brushing away the hand that held me up. I tried to persuade myself that I was reading for literary enjoyment. But the words kept echoing in my heart. I prayed and did not know that I prayed."

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 81 (italics added)

The Purpose of the Bible

"The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set down the written word in order to become living words in the world for God's sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith."

-Barbara Brown Taylor

For the Beauty of the Earth

For the beauty of the earth,
For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies,
Lord of all, to thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the beauty of each hour
Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale, and tree and flow'r,
Sun and moon and stars of light,
Lord of all to thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the joy of ear and eye,
For the heart and mind's delight,
For the mystic harmony
Linking sense to sound and sight,
Lord of all to thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth and friends above,
For all gentle thoughts and mild,
Lord of all to thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For each perfect gift of Thine
To our race so freely giv'n,
Graces human and divine,
Flow'rs of earth and buds of heav'n,
Lord of all to thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

Folliot S. Pierpoint

The Long Loneliness #1

"Children look at things very directly and simply. I did not see anyone taking off his coat and giving it to the poor. I didn't see anyone having a banquet and calling in the lame, the halt and the blind. Those who were doing it, like the Salvation Army, did not appeal to me. I wanted, though I did not know it then, a synthesis. I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life. I wanted it for others too. I did not want just the few, missionary-minded people like the Salvation Army, to be kind to the poor, as the poor. I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to be open to the lame, the halt and the blind, the way it had been after the San Francisco earthquake. Only then did people really live, really love their brothers. In such love was the abundant life and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it."

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 39. (italics added)

She Who Is

Bonhoeffer's insight continues to inspire religious reflection: "God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross...and that is the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us...Only a suffering God can help." But how can a suffering God be of any help? There is an element of truth to one woman's appalled objection to this kind of language with which many would sympathize. If I were at the bottom of a deep pit, aching, cold, and nursing a broken arm, she writes, "what I want and urgently need is a Rescuer with a very bright light and a long ladder, full of strength, joy and assurance who can get me out of the pit, not a god who sits in the darkness suffering with me." What she rightly rejects is the notion of a suffering God who is powerless, the antithesis of the omnipotent God. However, the human situation of agony and death is more internal to ourselves and more socially complex than this example would allow. Closer to the point is the reflection of another woman who spent endless days and nights on a hospital ward with her tiny, sick daughter, helping the nurses with the other babies when she could. It was a dreadful exposure to the meaningless suffering of the innocent. "On those terrible children's wards," she writes, "I could neither have worshipped nor respected any God who had not himself cried out, 'My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' Because it was so, because the creator loved his creation enough to become helpless with it and suffer in it, totally overwhelmed by the pain of it, I found there was still hope."
This is one way the symbol of a suffering God can help: by signaling that the mystery of God is here in solidarity with those who suffer. In the midst of the isolation of suffering the presence of divine compassion as companion to the pain transforms suffering, not mitigating its evil but bringing an inexplicable consolation and comfort. In her phenomenology of compassion Wendy Farley notes how compassion with its sympathetic knowledge:

does not stand outside the suffering in handwringing sympathy. It does not peer down on the victim and demand a stoicism that denies the pain. It begins where the sufferer is, in the grief, the shame, the hopelessness. It sees the despair as the most real thing. Compassion is with the sufferer, turned toward or submerged in her experience, seeing it with her eyes. This communication with the sufferer in her pain, as she experiences it, is the presence of love that is a balm to the wounded spirit. This relationship of shared, sympathetic suffering mediates consolation and respect that can empower the sufferer to bear the pain, to resist humiliation, to overcome the guilt.

Communion becomes a profound source of energy for the healing of suffering. Knowing that we are not abandoned makes all the difference.

Excerpted from: Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is, pp. 266-267

The Suffering of God

Search the Scriptures,
for in them you will find
this God of the loveless,
this God of Mercy, Love and Justice,
who weeps over these her children,
these her precious ones who have been carried from the womb,
who gathers up her young upon her wings
and rides along the high places of the earth,
who sees their suffering
and cries out like a woman in travail,
who gasps and pants;
for with this God,
any injustice that befalls one of these precious ones
is never the substance
of rational reflection and critical analysis,
but is the source
of a catastrophic convulsion within the very life of God.

Karen Drescher

in The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective
By Terence Fretheim
(Opening Pages)