Da Vinci and the Bible (without the Code)
We have a tendency to perceive our view as right, and others’ views as wrong. We are very quick to say, “can you believe the things those people actually think”, when truthfully, our view may be just as off base.
Maybe the majority of views hold elements of truth.
We have no perfect view that captures everything. Some are more reliable than others, and one may appeal to us over another. In all likelihoods they each have some truth to them and by looking at them collectively we may get a more rounded, healthier picture. We have to stay humble, willing to admit that our view may be messed up, and similarly willing to admit that a view that does not appeal to us may hold some truth as well. Neither shunning nor totally embracing everything that comes our way.
The famous Last Super painting by Da Vinci, because of his experimental technique, was falling apart from the time it was painted. As a result it has been retouched, fixed and edited repeatedly over the years. In the latter part of the 20th century it was restored, removing subsequent additions and touch ups made by other artists. This restoration brought the painting closer to its original form than it had been for centuries.
Ironically, many people were upset by this.
They preferred the painting in the way they always knew it. They preferred their IDEA of what the painting was over what the painting actually looked like when originally painted.
They didn’t want authentic, they wanted comfortable, they wanted familiar. We hold onto our view of life in the same way. We want to cling to comfortable and familiar. Sometimes, although we claim to love the ‘original’, we really love our IDEA of what things should be. We think of God in a certain light and we reject any ideas about him that don’t fit our view. We judge people who think differently. We judge people that see the bible in a different light.
Like so many things we need to be willing to throw away our idea of how things are in order to gain a hint of what things really may be.
………………………………..
I just came across this sentiment in some notes I wrote at a conference/seminar 3 years ago. Somehow it seems just as timely now as it was then.
I can’t speak for my coreligionists, but, personally, I wish they’d break the bad habit of making supposedly authoritative scientific truth claims from the standpoints of theological orthodoxy and devotion to doctrine. The religious mind–which conceives the world in terms of myth, mystery, ritual and wonder–has its own value apart from the rational endeavors of the scientists and the philosophers. The religious mind seeks a unique truth, even when its truth discloses a reality also pursued in other disciplines. Its methods of inquiry and verification are different than those of science and philosophy. Let them dialogue, but let’s not confuse them. Because each has its own truth to offer, religious faith and reason have much to say to one another. In my opinion, we benefit from listening to both and from cultivating a mind informed by both religiosity and reason.
Parables retold
Matt Mikalatos had a similar upbringing to me (or I to him), having been fully imersed in Christian culture and education from soother to drivers license.
As he says here
One side effect of growing up in Christian culture can be a certain contemptuous familiarity with the Bible. I remember impatiently tapping my feet when we trotted out the Christmas story, begging for it to end so we could tear into the presents. I remember playing “Bible Trivial Pursuit” in sixth grade and thinking to myself, “I know everything there is to know about the Bible, except how to pronounce some of the names.”
And having heard the stories over and over, it’s hard sometimes to really hear things anew. It becomes difficult to get the initial impact that these unusual stories would have had on the original audience - a mottly mix of religious men, widows, children, tax collectors and fishermen all crowded around hearing some man talk about the truths of life not in theological treaties, but in stories. Unexpected stories.
Matt’s retelling of these biblical parable brings back to life the messages that may have got lost somewhere among the flannel picture boards of my youth. Or perhaps the shouting preachers, badly animated tv specials or our preconceived ideas of what Jesus was really on about.
For a fresh look at some very old but powerful stories, have a look. I look forward to reading more from Matt. I really loved these.
Introduction
Part One: The Teacher shares about a trip to the zoo
Part Two: The old woman who almost loses it
Part Three: Frank chases his dreams in Hollywood
Part Four: The lost son
…language can be a window through which one glimpses God, but never a box in which God can be contained.
The Fine Print Gospel #2
Amputees, Guessing Games & How to Win an Argument
Love Wins.
It shouldn’t be controversial to start a blog post with that phrase.
But somehow over the past few months, that phrase has become one of the most popular catalysts for controversy among groups of Christians on the Internet.
For those that are unaware, a popular yet controversial Christian author, Rob Bell, wrote a book recently called “Love Wins”. In true internet form, before the book was even released, and before anyone had read the contents of said book, a handful of other well known Christian authors and leaders starting disowning this man as even a Christian. They had determined, that because what it seemed he might say in his new book disagreed with what they decided they believed, that he was no longer in the ‘in’ club.
This became one of the top trending topics in the world on twitter for a short time. In fact, it got to the point that other people began to hear about the controversy and wanted to know why all these Christians were bickering so badly, calling each other names and attacking each other.
Having grown up in ‘the church’ and been in Christian circles my whole life, I have been in several situations before where Christians from one group or denomination will refuse to accept that other Christians from another denomination are even Christians.
I’ve heard people make flippant statements like
Catholics aren’t christians, this church or that church is a cult or that this person or that persons a heretic, so and so is a backslider. Why? Well, because I disagree with them.
And so the truth is this; Christians aren’t always know for their unity. So I am going to ask a difficult question about Christianity.
Why are we so divided?
Why is it, that even within ” christianity” we can’t all get along?
Proverbs 26:4-5
4Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
or you will be like him yourself.5Answer a fool according to his folly,
or he will be wise in his own eyes.
We love isolated quotes. Bite sized snippets of wisdom. ‘Fun’ sized portions of knowledge. Appetizers are delicious, but they are only the starter for the main course.
Sound bites are good. But complete stories are even better.
Look at the ancient hebrew and christian book of Proverbs. Ancient, timeless wisdom if ever there were any.
Proverbs 26 verse 4 gives us a snippet of this ancient insight.
Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.
Most of us easily recognize the truth in this. Personally, I know I’ve made a fool of myself in the past arguing in pointless debates over things that don’t even matter. Experience teaches me that this is true.
Then take a look at verse 5, the very next verse.
Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.
Somehow, this too seems true.
On their own, both verses challenge us to evaluate our responses to ‘folly’.
And each verse, taken on it’s own, gives us alot to think about…
The appetizer tastes good.
But verse 4 and 5 together give us so much more to think about.
This, to me, is the perfect example of why single sentences pulled out of a larger body of text can be misleading, and why the entire story narrative is so valuable.
It’s not that either verse on it’s own is inherently untrue. In fact - it is just because they are both true that together they profoundly become even truer. They encompass the tension of life’s contradictions, the inherent need for wisdom in the application of knowledge, and the mystery of how opposites interact and play in our lives.
Do not answer the fool according to his folly…but then again, sometimes… do.
4 Good Reasons Not to Read the Bible Literally | Involuntary-Guest-Post
Involuntary-Guest-Post by David Lose
Cards on the table:
1) I read the Bible — not as much as I should, I’m sure, but still pretty regularly. Moreover, I get paid to talk about the Bible with folks all across the country and have written a popular book to help people read the Bible with more confidence and enjoyment. So, you could say, I’m a pretty big fan of the good book.
2) I was a little shocked to discover that three in ten Americans read the Bible literally. That is, about a third of the American populace takes everything the Bible says at face value, reading as they would a history or science textbook.
3) I don’t read the Bible this way, and can’t imagine doing so.
Here are four reasons why:
1) Nowhere does the Bible claim to be inerrant.
That’s right. At no place in its more than 30,000 verses does the Bible claim that it is factually accurate in terms of history, science, geography and all other matters (the technical definition of inerrancy). “Inerrant” itself is not a word found in the Bible or even known to Christian theologians for most of history. Rather, the word was coined in the middle of the 19th century as a defensive counter measure to the increased popularity of reading the Bible as one would other historical documents and the discovery of manifold internal inconsistencies and external inaccuracies.
The signature verse most literalists point to is 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” But one can confess that Scripture is inspired by God without resorting to claims that it contains no factual errors. We normally use the language of inspiration in just this way, describing a painting, a performance of Chopin, or even a good lecture as inspired. What binds the various and sundry texts found in the Bible together may be precisely that they are all inspired by the authors’ experience of the living God. There is no hint that the authors of the Bible imagined that what they were writing was somehow supernaturally guaranteed to be factually accurate. Rather, biblical authors wrote in order to be persuasive, hoping that by reading their witness you would come to believe as they did (see John 20:30-31).
2) Reading the Bible literally distorts its witness.
In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Jerusalem Temple in the days immediately preceding his crucifixion. In the Gospel of John, he does this near the beginning of his ministry, two years before his death. Similarly, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the day Jesus is crucified is named as the Passover, while in John it is the Day of Preparation; that is, the day before Passover. Inconsistencies like this are part of what undermines claims to inerrancy of not just the gospels but also many other books in the Bible.
But if the primary intention of the biblical authors was not to record history — in the post-Enlightenment sense we take for granted today — but instead to confess faith, then these differences are not troubling inconsistencies to be reconciled but rather helpful clues to understanding the confession of the author. So rather than ask who got it right, we might instead wonder why John describes these events differently than the other Evangelists. As it turns out, both of these examples stem from John’s theological claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb. For this reason, once he begins his ministry there is no need for Temple sacrifice, and he is crucified on the same day — indeed, at the exact hour — at which the Passover lambs were sacrificed on the Day of Preparation.
You can attempt to reconcile these and other discrepancies in the biblical witness, of course, and literalists have published books almost as long as the Bible attempting to do just that. In the case of the different timeframes for the cleansing of the Temple, for instance, one might suggest that Jesus did this twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and then again, for good measure, two years later. But far from “rescuing” the gospels, such an effort distorts their distinct confession of faith by rendering an account of Jesus’ life that none of the canonical accounts offers.
3) Most Christians across history have not read the Bible literally.
We tend to think of anything that is labeled “conservative” as being older and more traditional. Oddly enough, however, the doctrine of inerrancy that literalists aim to conserve is only about a century and a half old. Not only did many of the Christian Church’s brightest theologians not subscribe to anything like inerrancy, many adamantly opposed such a notion. For instance, St. Augustine — rarely described as a liberal — lived for many years at the margins of the church. An impediment to his conversation was precisely the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale. It was not until Ambrose, bishop of Milan, introduced Augustine to allegorical interpretation — that is, that stories can point metaphorically to spiritual realities rather than historical facts — that Augustine could contemplate taking the Bible (and those who read it!) seriously.
The point isn’t that pre-modern Christians approached the Bible with the same historically conscious skepticism of the Bible’s factual and scientific veracity that modern interpreters possess. Earlier Christians — along with almost everyone else who lived prior to the advent of modernity — simply didn’t imagine that for something to be true it had to be factually accurate, a concern only advanced after the Enlightenment. Hence, four gospels that diverged at different points, far from troubling earlier Christians, was instead seen as a faithful and fitting recognition that God’s truth as revealed in Jesus was too large to be contained by only one perspective. Flattening the biblical witness to conform to a reductionist understanding of truth only limits the power of Scripture. As Karl Barth, arguably the twentieth century’s greatest theologian, once said, “I take the Bible too seriously to read it literally.”
4) Reading the Bible literally undermines a chief confession of the Bible about God.
Read the Bible even for a little while and you’ll soon realize that most of the major characters are, shall we say, less than ideal. Abraham passes his wife off as his sister — twice! — in order to save his skin. Moses is a murderer. David sleeps around. Peter denies Jesus three times. Whatever their accomplishments, most of the “heroes of the faith” are complicated persons with feet of clay. And that’s the point: the God of the Bible regularly uses ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.
Why, then, treat the Bible itself differently? Rather than imagine that the Bible was also written by ordinary, fallible people, inerrantists have made the Bible an other-wordly, supernatural document that runs contrary to the biblical affirmation that God chooses ordinary vessels — “jars of clay,” the Apostle Paul calls them — to bear an extraordinary message. In fact, literalists unwittingly ascribe to the Bible the status of being “fully human and fully divine” that is normally reserved only for Jesus.
(via Unsettled Christianity)
- David Lose
David Lose is the Director of the Center for Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary where he also teaches with amazing students and colleagues and, once upon a time, served as Academic Dean. David led the creative team that developed Working Preacher where he writes a weekly column on the upcoming lectionary texts. Author of the popular books Making Sense of Scripture and Making Sense of the Christian Faith, David speaks throughout the U.S. and abroad on preaching, leadership, Christian faith in a postmodern world and biblical interpretation.
(via jamesfromta)
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatsoever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
