Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by William F Rushby on 5th mo. 18, 2016 at 12:14pm

Forrest: You have a real gift for the use of words.

I am not sure exactly what message you intend to convey in this "poem" (I guess that's what modernes would call it!) but, for me, it testifies to the elusiveness of trust in God, which we so badly need in our one-dimensional world.

"Man does not live by bread alone."  And that goes for you too, ladies!

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 18, 2016 at 1:29pm

For one thing: that faithing is not 'believing', nor anything to be achieved by force or effort or desire (although anything in life can serve as midwife...)

Trust in God is a good & needed way to follow; but trust turns readily to belief in substitutes -- & can be drowned out by the noise of our own desperate insistence that we will get, must have, some other thing we've fixed our desire on instead.

It isn't so much that God is elusive, but that people so automatically avert their eyes, relying on whatever they've learned, even if that's clearly a dead end to anyone not clinging to someone's accustomed idol.

A 'gift for the use of words' is clearly a Gift, but that by itself doesn't seem to convey everything I'd like when I'd like it to. Hence, 'discussion' rather than just 'blog'.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by William F Rushby on 5th mo. 19, 2016 at 8:43am

Forrest: Please note that I didn't say that God is elusive, only that our trust in Him is elusive!  As concerns belief, I don't believe in anything, except the Bible and the Apostles Creed!!!  Have a good day!

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 19, 2016 at 1:04pm

I'm inclined to think that practically everybody finds God (seemingly) 'elusive' because we have trouble seeing how to recognize either God or the obstacles our expectations impose on that recognition.

You will find examples of that phenomena in the Bible if you're alert to it. As for the Apostles Creed, God must consider it a useful heuristic influence on those who find it so; but I come up empty on that particular list of stuff.

One trouble with 'believing in' the Bible is that people are bound to mean "what I think the Bible means", which usually isn't what the people who wrote it meant -- while whatever God wants us to learn from it can involve a challenging 'learning experience'[Bleh!]

If we'd been born seeing things as God does, we wouldn't need the Bible -- but we aren't; so what God is trying to tell people (despite His intrinsic 'gift for using words') is simply difficult for us to get, by the very expectations we put into reading it. (These -- as you should also find happening many times to people in the Bible -- run heavily towards "God yesterday, God tomorrow, but never God today.")

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by William F Rushby on 5th mo. 19, 2016 at 2:09pm

Hello again, Forrest, from the rain-drenched mountains of (western) Virginia!

You don't mention all of the impediments our culture and "knowledge" present to those who read the Bible.  We live in a time and place where the Bible is widely disdained, even though Biblical models of reality (and even the language of the Bible) are deeply embedded in our culture.  Some claim that they receive their religious convictions and beliefs directly from God or from wherever, and not from the Bible.  I keep wondering how they manage to grow up in a society and culture so deeply imbued with Biblical ideas and language without the implicit Biblicism of our culture shaping their values, beliefs and feelings????

You wrote: "One trouble with 'believing in' the Bible is that people are bound to mean 'what I think the Bible means...'"  This is where we need the counsel of the hermeneutical community: "Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety."   Proverbs 11:14 KJV  We need other believers to help us rightly discern what God wants us to learn from the Bible.

Even as with your poem, the Bible has multiple layers of meaning.  There is the intent of the original writers; there is the understanding of the "great cloud of witnesses" (i.e., historical interpretation(s) of the church and synagogue); and lastly, there is what the Bible means to you and me, in our personal, historical and cultural situation.  And finally, there what God wants us to learn from the Bible!

The Orthodox Jewish sociologist, Samuel Heilman, once wrote about stepping out onto the street, and seeing a bumper sticker: "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it."  Heilman suggested a Jewish version: "God said it, I believe it, and now lets talk about what it means."

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 19, 2016 at 3:29pm

Considerable considerations to consider here... but for a start, what has really been "deeply embedded in our culture" was the ongoing tendency to read our cultural models into a Bible that was written by & for an entirely different culture that itself underwent a long series of developments and foreign influences.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 20, 2016 at 12:46pm

The current public ambivalence toward the Bible is likewise worth some discussion.

Partly, of course, the Bible lost prestige when people realized it was not a science book (although it had featured state-of-the-art cosmology from the time it was first assembled, ie mostly in Babylon with some unknown degree of filtering through Persian influences later, 'Isaiah'calling Cyrus the messiah for example.)

"Science" is still the given religion as far as a great many people are concerned; anything else looks like heresy or at least is not to be taken seriously.

People quite naturally object to some of the wiggier & less savory messages that wiggy, unsavory people claim to find in the Bible, likewise resent efforts to impose standards from previous cultures (which largely evaded said standards themselves) on contemporary mores, see little reason to seek deeper truths from a source that's been used to justify so much oppression and unnecessary suffering in the past.

Mainly, as the poems says, people reject hope as a credible outlook (though they seize on false hopes from one fashionable illusion after another.) Realization that 'God is in His Heaven; and all is right with the world ["though some things could use a little improvement"]' is really a stretch from the common worldview and most people's concrete situations.

Luckily, people are not consistent. Hence, progress is possible. 

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by William F Rushby on 5th mo. 21, 2016 at 2:47pm

I think there are various reasons why people reject the Bible as a source of authority.  Scientism is certainly one problem; taking a map of one part of reality, and treating it as a map of the totality.  That's like taking a map of California, and attempting to find your way around Florida with it.

Another problem is that people think they "know better" than the church did in the past, and that traditional moral standards are no longer applicable or relevant.  I guess we only need to look around to see how that's working out!

A third reason people reject the Bible as a worldview is that they have accepted some other worldview.  There are many belief systems available in the ideological marketplace now that were not easily accessible in the past.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 21, 2016 at 7:23pm

People do tend to know better about what sort of behavior will work in the current social mileau than in those that existed in past cultures. We would, for example, be taken aback if a large crowd of neighbors showed up outside our doors demanding the right to rough up our out-of-town guests to find out who they are and what they're up to; and if this happened, offering them a chance to molest our virgin daughters, rather than ruin our reputation of hospitality, would not seem like the honorable thing to do.

For a young woman to have unauthorized sex with a young man would disturb some of us; it would not typically provoke a shooting war between his family and hers. Circumstances, social expectations, and probable consequences have changed. People quite naturally prefer to do what they want, to not do what they don't want; and a book written long ago by people who did not know them -- and had some pretty bizarre notions of how things work -- does not easily persuade people to do otherwise, particularly since they usually come to know of that book from other people trying to _claim_ authority over their lives because 'That's what it says.'

When Jesus forbade people to divorce a wife in order to marry some other woman, that was at the time a mortal insult to her family, in a culture where feuds over family honor were a real possibility. Herod Antipas, whose behavior provoked the question in the first place, was consequently ensnared in a disasterous war when his ex excaped the palace with a party of trusted guards and galloped home to her father's kingdom. But in some places the quote has been used to keep people trapped in marriages from Hell ever since.

It is not the Bible that should be 'a source of authority,' but the underlying Being it points to. God may indeed want people to recognize 'His' superior wisdom on how best to orient themselves and let their lives be ordered; the Bible is a helpful resource as to how people have understood and responded to the Divine influence in the past, both well and ill -- but much of it also illustrates the way people persistently interpose their own desires and pretenses to authority instead.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by William F Rushby on 5th mo. 21, 2016 at 9:50pm

Thomas S. Brown 1st issue of *Quaker Religious Thought* (Spring, 1959): "If Quakerism is to be strong in its heritage from the Spiritual Reformation, it must keep its roots in the Bible, which is a living record of the struggle between God and man, between monotheism and idolatry, between fulfillment and pride, and which is a record from beginning to end of the urgent work of the Holy Spirit in admonishing, redeeming, empowering men in the great work of the Kingdom of God.  Here is the record of an 'experimental' relationship with God far older and far more inclusive than anything in the brief life of Quakerism."

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 22, 2016 at 1:02am

A record "from beginning to end"? Is the Spirit done with us, then? Hardly.

Further, this is an account from the human side of the Divine/human conversation. And more than once in that account, you find people thinking that the tradition to date was sufficient, only to be challenged by new circumstances. The life of wandering herdsmen leads Israel to Egypt, apparent success there which becomes slavery. God sends Moses into exile, then rips him out of that life of retreat into the liberation of these slaves... the establishment of laws and customs, eventual settlement in the hills of Canaan in a loose confederation of tribes unified spiritually by a family of Levites at Shiloh and militarily by a succession of temporary war-chiefs. Those priests are supposed to hold their position 'forever', but they succumb to corruption and blow it. Everyone has known that Yahweh is their king, that they need no other -- and then they demand a human king, and get one no better than he should be. Suddenly the Monarchy has become what God intends, its Temple at Jerusalem the increasingly obligatory center of their worship... but prophets keep showing up to add their criticisms, observing that this system is not serving God's ends and will not endure unless the nation changes its ways... which doesn't happen, and do the Babylonians come in & clear away everything. To the Israelite leaders in exile, ethnic purity, exclusivity and distinctives naturally come to seem all-important, and when they return to Judea, set the tone of the Temple-state they establish there under Persian domination and influence. Greek conquest of the 'world', a temporary period of independence, and then the inexorable grip of the Romans all influence their beliefs, customs, and practices. And then Jesus leads a movement which ends up challenging everything the mainstream religious leaders thought they knew -- which in turn gets changed almost past recognition by Paul and his successors. Mainstream Judaism, meanwhile,  changes in a similar way as the destruction of the 2nd Temple returns Hillel's followers to leadership.

Both religions were then considerably modified over almost 2000 years of rapid historical change; leaders of both concluded that the canon of scripture was complete, but what those scriptures mean to people continues to be reinterpreted. In Christianity, 'infallible' authorities get replaced with new infallible authorities of various flavors, fighting each other viciously until everyone realizes they're just going to have to live with other people's "errors".

So now we find heirs of one of the more radical reinterpretations of all this... writing as if the work of the Spirit on us reached an 'end' two thousand years ago -- and can conclude with ceding authoritative status to writings collected soon afterwards...?

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by William F Rushby on 5th mo. 22, 2016 at 5:05pm

Hello, Forrest!  Thanks for your reply.

I think you have misinterpreted Thomas Brown's statement that [the Bible] " is a record from beginning to end of the urgent work of the Holy Spirit in admonishing, redeeming, empowering men in the great work of the Kingdom of God."  Thomas Brown never claimed that "the work of the Spirit on us reached an 'end' two thousand years ago... "  What he is claiming is that the whole of the Bible, from its beginning to its end, addresses the great work of the Kingdom of God.

Your discussion appears on the surface to be an intellectual assessment of the enduring significance of the Bible. But, behind the intellectual rhetoric, I see a rather heavy negative, emotional substrate.  Your approach calls to mind what Friends in the past had in mind when they claimed that the Bible cannot be understood adequately unless it is read in the same spirit in which it was given forth.  One must read the Bible with an open heart and an open mind if one wants to receive its witness!

Since the beginning of the Quaker faith is so thoroughly interlaced with the Bible, it is hard to see how one can understand the Quaker tradition without recourse to its Biblical roots.

• ▶ Reply

▶ Reply to Discussion

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page