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I’m very excited as I can now take the lid off the next big event that I am involved in planning: “St Andrews Unwrapped”. Basically, the format is an evening of entertainment and fun in one of the function rooms. We then charge an entrance fee for this event (and have as many opportunities as possible to get more money from people through donations), the proceeds of which then go to Oxfam Unwrapped. At the end of the evening, we have a vote where people get to choose which projects they want to sponsor and where we announce the grand total.
There is a lot of organisation to be done and I am slightly scared and stressed by it – but I have an amazing group of people who are all working incredibly hard, so I have every confidence the event will be a success and raise loads of money.
So there we have it!
So now I, prompted slightly by Joanna who asked me what I thought on the matter, I thought I would take the time to pull together various comments I have made throughout the blog about the Bible. As many people are aware, a lot of the churches in the area and, of course, the Christian Union, are fairly conservatively evangelical (for the latter dare I say fundamentalist?) in their approach to the Bible, with either a theology of infallibility or inerrancy being taught to some degree at both (which surprised me, as I have to admit I thought the whole inerrancy and infallibility debate didn’t really exist in the UK). Therefore, this has forced me to rethink what I think about the Bible and this post is an attempt to work out what I actually do think.
I was slightly cautious in putting this post out there because, by the nature of its importance in the Christian faith, whatever I am going to say is bound to upset at least one person who is reading this and convince many people (probably most of whom don’t read this) that I’m even more dodgy and liberal than first thought and that I should never be let near a church, especially a Baptist one! Therefore, I would like to at least pre-empt this with two statements: 1) I really, really love the Bible. I maybe only understand bits of it, and there are bits of it that challenge, scare, inspire, annoy, appeal to and confuse me. But I love it. Please hear all my remarks in that context. 2) This should not be seen as my final opinion of what I think about the Bible, but just a preliminary “what I think I think about the Bible” – no doubt I will explore some of the points I make here in more depth at a later stage, and change my mind about some things and wish I had said some things better or not said other things at all. Therefore, please also read this as a work in progress and a way of trying to flesh out my ideas.
First, I think it would be wise to consider a bit about the nature of the Bible as a text. It is obviously hard to make generalisations about a text that was written over a time span of over a thousand years, edited and reedited by various scholars and rabbinical groups over that time (for example, it is questionable as to whether it is actually possible to fully get to the Jeremiah behind the book of Jeremiah, such is the scope of Jewish editing that took place over the centuries) and then finally put together in its current form by a series of synods in the third and fourth centuries before being altered again by the Reformers in the 16th century. Therefore, it is a beautifully ancient book written by various different authors in various different situations, most of who were writing in different world views to us and asking different questions about the world. When considered like that, I guess the first miracle is that the Bible speaks to us at all in a 21st Century, mostly postmodern, Western culture.
Which I guess is why I never got the whole inerrant/infallible point of view, ideologies that try to turn the text into a Western Modernist document – a philosophy of epistemology that stems from the Enlightenment and Renaissance, and which argues that what matters most in seeking to know about the world that is around us is concrete, verifiable judgements of fact. Whether or not something is quantifiable, measurable, provable. Therefore, in Modernism, when texts touch on science, they are expected to be scientifically accurate and where they touch on history, there are expected to be objectively factually correct. When applied to the Bible, you begin to see trends like systematic theology, the height of Modernist theology, the belief that everything can be sewn up and a coherent and defined theology can be argued from across the Bible with regards to issues such as sexuality, ethics, politics and the nature of God, or even about the origins of the world or the nature of history according to some schools. That, by drawing different verses from different contexts and different books in the Bible, we can get a factually objective point of view about what is and what isn’t.
Except the trouble is the Bible has never been a modernist text. It was written under a totally different set of worldviews, where there was often not the need to have facts as demonstrably true or false and where often, when it came to accounts about a community’s history, what matters most seems to be the point and nature of the story rather than the exact factual details. You can see this for example reading pre-modern history chronicles of nations such as Russia, which mix in factual details about trade treaties and alliances with fairy tales and myths about magicians – and see no contrast between the two. Please don’t misunderstand me – I am not saying that the God of the Bible belongs in the same category as fairy tales, nor am I saying that the Bible is not God breathed. Rather, I am arguing that we are doing it a disservice by trying to approach it as a modernist text, which is the goal of systematic theology, because fundamentally it is not but it is a much more complex and varied set of texts.
Many questions which we seek to come to a theology on today are not questions which the Bible deals with explicitly – euthanasia, modern warfare, climate care, homosexuality, trans-sexuality, trade justice and the role of Christianity in modern politics. Likewise, many of the things that do seem cultural norms and blatantly clear in the Bible we ignore – Sabbath, food laws, greeting people with a kiss. And then of course there are the parts of the Bible that are just embarrassing to us today – passages that seem to affirm slavery or that seem to set up women as second class citizens.
I do not believe it is to minimise the importance of the Bible to raise these questions and doubts about the way many of us try to ‘do’ theology (in as much as theology can ever be something that is merely an intellectual exercise). Neither do I believe it to be a liberal point of view that seeks to deny what is ‘clearly in the Bible’ in order to make it more acceptable to the 21st century – maybe it is my Baptist heritage coming out, but I do believe that our beliefs should be founded upon the Bible and that our theology has to emerge, in some way or another, from doing business with the text. Rather, I would argue, acknowledging the flaws of systematic theology and trying to use the Bible as a inerrant/infallible document it is to set the Bible free from being the users’ manual, there to answer our questions, and instead to rediscover it as the haunting and ancient narrative of the Creator God’s staggering care for the world worked out through communities of imperfect and unfinished people who all try their best to explain the God they follow and the world around them through a variety of genres, situations, hopes and expectations – and ultimately, through a staggering narrative form beginning to end of the acknowledgement of the brokenness of the world but the promise and hope of final restoration. And in the centre of this amazing story, the glorious climax, is the person of God as the word of God incarnated as Jesus Christ, who Paul sums up as being “the image of the invisible God”.
Therefore, I think if we are to do justice to the Bible as Christians who seek to be faithful both to the Bible and to the God behind the Bible, it is to be through acknowledging the power of narrative. To see that it is a text with lots of contradictions, reinterpretations within itself, embarrassing bits and stuff that just seems plain wrong. But to admit that in the narrative there is also the subversive message of a different way of living and being in the world, as restored creatures seeking to follow a dangerous and living God. The suggestions that maybe the values of the dominant empire – values of profit, power, individualism, materialism – which we as Christians often seem far too caught up in, are not the only way to live but that actually there is another way of being. To see the hope of us not just as redeemed people but as redeeming people, partnering with God to work towards the final climax of restoration, half glimpses and guesses of the full glorious extent of which are found throughout the Bible.
Sure, such an approach to the Bible makes life harder. We have to live in the tension, be prepared to form new theologies and new ways of being as our old ones get challenged by crossing boundaries. We might have to admit we can no longer come to easy, clean, sewn up theologies regarding sexuality, eschatology or ecclesiology – but instead have to be attentive to the wild, unsettling and dangerous breath of the Holy Spirit. We must constantly tread the prophetic tightrope between relativism on one hand and irrelevant objectivity on the other. It means being vulnerable, being people defined by the scary, threatening, countercultural stories of a people living with a counter cultural God, as opposed to people living with a nice, clearly defined theology of in and out, right and wrong, good and bad. But I think that’s OK – Jesus never said blessed are the secure and the safe and the comfortable – he did however call people to an unwavering call to obedience that challenged the religious, political and social status quo and to follow an uncertain road of faith.
In the end, we have to be people who soaked in the stories of the Bible, in all their messiness and uncertainty and confusion, and find the God behind the stories and ultimately the call to obedience and to come and follow. Walter Brueggemann puts it like this:
“The alternative script is rooted in the Bible and enacted through the tradition of the church. Many of us have become embarrassed about that ancient script because of our awareness of the ideological failures that are present in it. We are too ready to hand it over to the waiting arms of the dominant ideology; we have given up on the hard work of hearing and speaking the alternative message in what Karl Barth termed “the strange new world within the Bible.” Barth understood that we cannot find in the Bible many of the things for which we look. But what we find there is an alternative world, an alternative network of symbols and signs that stitched together yield a coherence that subverts dominant scripts, a world in which newness keeps welling up . . . Israel and the church have on their hands a haunting text, filled with dark shadows and an inscrutable presence, not predictable, not held in our ideology, not confined to our familiar worlds. This haunting text, which always surprises us at the edge of reality, is inhabited by the holy one who makes a restless home in the text. The text is a haunted place like the old houses we used to fear to visit as a child. And like those old houses, we mostly go by quickly at a distance, not wanting to come into serious contact, because whenever we do, our prefab world is put at risk.”
Ultimately, we need to read the Bible to be reminded of the story which we find ourselves in, the story in which we are actors and to then go out and continue that story in obedient service of the God who is behind the story.
So – there we are. Comments more than welcome 
. . . is on Monday, which means this is a long weekend. Which means I have finally got some time to, amongst other things, update this blog. Yes, I am aware I have been woefully inadequate in updating it over the last week (it’s been a VERY long week and some of my spare time has been spent in fiddling around with code for the 2nd Sunday website – the street event, by the way, looked amazing and I’m very sad to have missed it. It did make me feel quite homesick, but I cured some of that by putting on some Arabic music last night to celebrate Eid . . .). Therefore, I will attempt to make up for this lack of blogging with two separate posts today.
As I think the photos showed, last weekend was a lot of fun – and a lot of energy. I think I was recovering until about Thursday from sleep deprivation and the constant finding of foam in my ears, but I did really enjoy myself, which was the main thing. I think it’s fair to say I have the best academic families in St Andrews. Lectures this week, however, have been a lot more hectic, partly because of the tiredness and also because the pace of work and the intensity seems to be picking up. However, one exciting bit of news is that I have now learnt the past tense in Russian. So. Not only can I say that Peter Green lives in Moscow but I can say that he used to live in London (from my point of view, the further away Peter Green can get from me, the better!).
Outside of lectures, things have also been really hectic. Link group were round here on Tuesday night for a pudding party, and then Melissa, Naomi and Joanna stayed on afterwards to enjoy the dubious production of my cooking whilst we discussed Melissa’s hitherto unknown writing talents. In the interests of her future career, I won’t say anything about this writing on the internet, but I think it’s safe to say that I shall never look at Wuthering Heights in the same way again . . . all I can say is we’re really going to miss her when she disappears back to America at Christmas and she’d better be coming back soon!
Then last night, we had some people round for a homemade pizza and tequila night. I particularly liked the pizza that I came up with, involving tomatoes, onions, spinach, mozarella, cheddar, chutney and olives. Other people seemed to enjoy it too (not sure this is a good thing – I could have quite happily eaten it all myself), so it can’t have been horrendous.
Last Sunday, we went to see Dr David Muir, Public Theology Director of the Evangelical Alliance, who was preaching in St Salvator’s chapel. He had some interesting things to say, and it was certainly intriguing to get a look in and see how someone that high up the EA sees the role of evangelicalism in society at the moment. It was a mixed bag, from my point of view – a lot of really good stuff on mission, standing up for the rights of the poor and the marginalised, standing up for trade justice and environmental care. However, there were a couple of bits that also made me cringe, particularly in respect to ‘family values’, and the EA’s theological training, designed to “mould young evangelical minds” (is it horrendously cynical to see this as a bit ‘Brave New World’?). However, as a speaker he was very interesting and he said a lot of good things. I’m especially looking forward to December 6th when John Bell from the Iona Community will be speaking at the chapel – I definitely can’t wait to go and see him. Also, we hung around for Communion after the service, which was a really nice affair: about 2o of us, really informal sharing but really nice liturgy too. There is something especially beautiful about having communion in a building that has been a place of worship for the best part of 600 years.
This evening I am going to go and meet with the chair of the DRA committee to have a chat about the gem of an idea I have had (more on this if it all works out), followed by the CU International Café, which is generally full of weird and wacky people.
Well this is one of the weekends of the academic calendar – Raisin Weekend. How does it work? Well, it’s basically just an excuse for the University to go mad and party, based around the academic families system and a lot of tradition. On the Sunday afternoon, we all go round our academic mothers’ for afternoon tea and games. Then in the evening we all go round our academic fathers’ to be plyed with large amounts of alcohol – this traditionally lasts well into the night.
Then on Monday, any headaches notwithstanding, we are all up early to go round our Mothers’ again to be dressed up in a silly costume, and then round to our Fathers’ to be given a large, unhelpfully cumbersone “raisin receipt” (generally the most inventively awkward object possible) which we then have to carry into the centre of town. Finally, the weekend culminates in a huge foam fight in the quad on Monday morning. Then, we trapse home for showers, have lunch and go to our afternoon tutorials (in theory). Should be fun . . .
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