Why read the Bible in 21st Century America?
Alasdair Macintyre in After Virtue notes:
I can only answer the question what am I to do?, if I can answer the prior question, of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
Paul D Hanson in A Political History of the Bible in America has commented:
To gain a solid footing for understanding the mixed legacy of American political history, it is necessary to turn to the more ancient epic from which the leaders of our nation, from colonial times to the present, and for better or for worse, derived justification for their actions. That epic is the Bible.
So a further question is Why read the Bible at St Martin’s? Walter Bruggemann in his reflection for Day 6 of The Bible Challenge says this:
In our society where we imagine we may be or must be on our own, prayer is the core acknowledgment that in fact our lives are referred beyond ourselves.
We are a society that must reclaim a civic conversation that is both communitarian and inclusive. Personal and public attitudes and actions result from identity shaping stories. Small stories dominated by bigotry and violence have a harm upon our civic conversation. Stories of healing and liberation shape ideas of virtue and civility. Sharing such stories strengthens the moral capital of a society. I return to Bruggeman’s concept of prayer referring us beyond ourselves. Reading it, we can experience the Bible as an anchor point for an experience that cumulatively builds up in us, the more we read. This experience refers us beyond the circularity of our own small conscious stories of God or other, expanding around us the richness and texture of a larger story against the backdrop of which we become aware of our lives being lived.
Daily Bible reading is not transactional. We cannot predict the effect as if we could produce a predetermined outcome. An analogy here might be the build up of minerals in the bloodstream as the result of daily intake.
Walter Bruggemann in The Prophetic Imagination contrasts the power of prophetic imagination against that of the imagination of empire:
It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
Reading history through a later lens
Much of the material in Genesis is technically myth material. Myth is an expansive story that transcends the dimensions of time and space. Myth is a once-upon-a-time story, e.g. Genesis 1 – 3 and is frequently misunderstood in two ways:
- Taken literally –as concrete truth- and imposed upon contemporary context e.g. creationism
- Taken as fairy story – i.e. not true –and having no application in a contemporary context
What we read in Genesis is the later written recording of ancient oral tradition stories. The stories in Genesis can’t be read literally because we receive them through a reading of history through a later lens. The oral tradition stories date from around 2000 B.C. What we read is the recording of these stories beginning around 1000 B.C. for the purpose of creating a national history for David’s unified Kingdom of Israel so that it might be a nation like other nations around it. We see the same process in our own recording of our national history. We tell our history in order to challenge but more commonly justify our current status quo of national attitudes and worldviews shaped by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.
The unified Kingdom of David was the end result of centuries of conquest and assimilation. Reading through the Davidic lens we read the story of Cain and Abel as a story about the conflict between herding and agrarian societies. The Israelites were a shepherding people, while the Canaanites were a farming people. Ergo, the story tells us that God favors herding activity over that of growing things. Noah curses his son Ham for beholding him while in naked, drunken stupor. Who are the children of Ham? Why none other than the Canaanites. In both stories, we see the later justification for the Israelite’s conquest of their neighbors and confiscation of their land.
In The Bible Challenge book, each day questions are posed following the daily commentary on the texts read. After the first week of The Bible Challenge here are some points we might focus on:
- Gen 1-18 covers 4 creation stories: Gen 1 & 2, Gen 3-4 (The Fall and the fist murder) and Gen 6-8 (Noah). Gen 9-11 deals with the sorting out of the Canaanite nations as a preparation for the call of Abram in Chpt12 and the creation of the Israelite people. What’s the highlight or the nadir for you?
- Note how Matt begins in true OT style with a genealogy – why?
- Matt 5-8 has a particular name – what is it? How do you feel about Jesus’ teaching here?
- How has the first week of The Bible Challenge affected you?
Days 22-28 editorial comment
/in Uncategorized /by msutherlandThe passages about the Exodus from Egypt raise some puzzling questions. Why did God harden Pharaoh’s, heart? Why should we celebrate the slaughter of the Egyptian army? Viewed from our post-Jesus perspective these are the acts of a barbarous tribal God. So this is perhaps the point.
These are the actions of God filtered through early and early Hebrew tribal and a later nationalist vision. When reading from this perspective the needless suffering God seems to inflict on the Egyptians is the device for the main point of the text. This is a text to remind the Israelites that God has heard us, God has freed us. Ours is a God who has taken the events of our captivity and freedom as occasions to show us his glory. We are now in no doubt that it is this God we must now love and worship.
It’s important to note our need to judge the text when it horrifies us. Yet, we need to move beyond this reaction and look behind the presentation to ask the question: what might this text mean to those for whom it was initially recorded? The subtext running at the heart of the Hebrew epic is that God has heard us, God has free us, God continues to preserve with us despite our trying of his patience in every conceivable way.
This subtext carries over into the Gospels. Throughout his ministry, and more so in the days leading to his death, Jesus is guided to act or not act by his mission that God will be fully revealed through him.
Matthew is my least favorite gospel because I experience Jesus at his most didactic and somehow detached. This, of course, is in keeping with Matthew’s view of Jesus filtered through the prototype of the greatest teacher of all, Moses. Am I able to get behind my personal reaction to Matthew to experience the words of Jesus as invitations for metanoia,i.e. the turning inside out or upside down of my heart. Jesus teaches through parables. Parables are stories drawn from everyday life in which everyday events are presented in order to challenge our default worldview. The parable of the workers in the vineyard in Chapter 20 is a case in point. Jesus conclusion is counter-intuitive to the way we normally understand just deserts. God’s sense of fairness confronts our notion of who is deserving and undeserving. Those who are important must behave as if they are the least in importance. This is a principle, whether we observe it or not in our living, that is deeply ingrained in us and so we can’t easily appreciate the radical challenge of this idea in a hierarchical world where power always went unchallenged and powerlessness was always exploited and despised. There is the simple story of the two sons, one who says yes but does not follow through and the other who says no, but then acts out his yes. How easily I see myself in this challenging story. This story then becomes the lens through which Jesus identifies through hypocrisy- appearing one way but in reality being its opposite, and all kinds of transactional thinking- acting in self-interest, or splitting hairs so as to absolve oneself of responsibility which in Chapter 23’s seven woes, so named because each begins with ‘Woe to you -‘. Here Jesus identifies the scribes and Pharisees as prototypes for these temptations in all of us.
Psalm 16 is perhaps my favorite psalm because of the lines because during what I look back on as a difficult time of life I was able to affirm the lines: The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage. In the psalms, we find the myriad echoes of our own thought and feelings.
Days 15-22 editorial comment
/in Uncategorized /by msutherlandAlasdair Macintyre in After Virtue notes:
I can only answer the question what am I to do?, if I can answer the prior question, of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
Day 19 has brought us to end of reading Genesis. We have encountered some rip-roaring yarns that put a lie to the assertion that the Bible is a book of cozy family values. The Genesis stories provoke a range of emotional responses in us from delight through incredulity, to horror and disgust. It’s important that we note the personal impact as we engage with these mythological stories. Remember that myth is an expansive story that transcends the dimensions of time and space. A myth is a once-upon-a-time story and is, in this case, the product of later editors recording in written form much earlier oral memories. I call them editors because they edit and arrange the stories to convey a contemporary message.
Genesis ends with the death of Jacob and the flourishing of Joseph. Exodus begins with the death of Joseph and the social upheaval in Egypt that resulted in the enslavement of the Hebrews, who over time had grown from a privileged ethnic clan to a national group that threatened the stability of Egyptian political society. With Exodus, we move from myth to epic stories. Epic is a story written across historical time, growing and changing, developing within the events of historical time. With the Moses cycle, we are now introduced to a series of events out of which the Hebrew Epic is born. Here the Israelites begin to identify as a nation who enter into a turbulent relationship with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Hebrew Epic begins with a God who hears the cries of his enslaved people and comes to their aid as a liberator. So starts the great central motif of the Judao-Christian Epic – God is one who hears the cries of the oppressed and frees them from captivity. Everything after this is history, as they say.
Jesus’ teaching in Matthew, in particular, is set against the backdrop of the Jewish Law. Matthew is the most Jewish of the Evangelists, writing for a Jewish Christian community still smarting from their expulsion from the synagogues as a newly emerging Rabbinical Judaism seeks to establish its boundaries. His anger with the Pharisees and Rabbis makes us uncomfortable as we read him following centuries of antisemitism in the Church and within living memory of the Holocaust. So it is important to understand that Matthew’s anger is a reflection of internal family conflict, as synagogue and church face one another from opposite sides of the street.
Reading Matthew these last three weeks has felt to me like running a breathless race, as he moves without letup from one difficult teaching to the next. I say difficult teaching because Jesus is opening up the inner meaning of the external regulations of the Law. External regulations are easy to fulfill in the sense you know when you have met the standard and when you fall short. Jesus’ teaching is more challenging because he is rooting behavior in the inner disposition of the heart. We can fulfill the external requirement, but where is our heart? Is it in alignment with the deeper spirit of Gods desire for us?
We have now read 19 Psalms. Have you begun to notice that many follow a three-fold structure? In part I, the psalmist will open with a line of praise before making his complaint to God. In part II he launches into an unabashed condemnation of his enemies. In part III he moves into a new tone of praise. For despite all his difficulties, God is there with him and for him.
In the Psalms, we find the mirror for every human condition and experience. No emotion of ours is alien to God. We need not hold back with our voice of complaint. After the catharsis of letting rip, we calm down enough to begin to experience the balm of God’s love for us.
Days 1-7 editorial comment
/in Uncategorized /by msutherlandWhy read the Bible in 21st Century America?
Alasdair Macintyre in After Virtue notes:
I can only answer the question what am I to do?, if I can answer the prior question, of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
Paul D Hanson in A Political History of the Bible in America has commented:
To gain a solid footing for understanding the mixed legacy of American political history, it is necessary to turn to the more ancient epic from which the leaders of our nation, from colonial times to the present, and for better or for worse, derived justification for their actions. That epic is the Bible.
So a further question is Why read the Bible at St Martin’s? Walter Bruggemann in his reflection for Day 6 of The Bible Challenge says this:
In our society where we imagine we may be or must be on our own, prayer is the core acknowledgment that in fact our lives are referred beyond ourselves.
We are a society that must reclaim a civic conversation that is both communitarian and inclusive. Personal and public attitudes and actions result from identity shaping stories. Small stories dominated by bigotry and violence have a harm upon our civic conversation. Stories of healing and liberation shape ideas of virtue and civility. Sharing such stories strengthens the moral capital of a society. I return to Bruggeman’s concept of prayer referring us beyond ourselves. Reading it, we can experience the Bible as an anchor point for an experience that cumulatively builds up in us, the more we read. This experience refers us beyond the circularity of our own small conscious stories of God or other, expanding around us the richness and texture of a larger story against the backdrop of which we become aware of our lives being lived.
Daily Bible reading is not transactional. We cannot predict the effect as if we could produce a predetermined outcome. An analogy here might be the build up of minerals in the bloodstream as the result of daily intake.
Walter Bruggemann in The Prophetic Imagination contrasts the power of prophetic imagination against that of the imagination of empire:
It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
Reading history through a later lens
Much of the material in Genesis is technically myth material. Myth is an expansive story that transcends the dimensions of time and space. Myth is a once-upon-a-time story, e.g. Genesis 1 – 3 and is frequently misunderstood in two ways:
What we read in Genesis is the later written recording of ancient oral tradition stories. The stories in Genesis can’t be read literally because we receive them through a reading of history through a later lens. The oral tradition stories date from around 2000 B.C. What we read is the recording of these stories beginning around 1000 B.C. for the purpose of creating a national history for David’s unified Kingdom of Israel so that it might be a nation like other nations around it. We see the same process in our own recording of our national history. We tell our history in order to challenge but more commonly justify our current status quo of national attitudes and worldviews shaped by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.
The unified Kingdom of David was the end result of centuries of conquest and assimilation. Reading through the Davidic lens we read the story of Cain and Abel as a story about the conflict between herding and agrarian societies. The Israelites were a shepherding people, while the Canaanites were a farming people. Ergo, the story tells us that God favors herding activity over that of growing things. Noah curses his son Ham for beholding him while in naked, drunken stupor. Who are the children of Ham? Why none other than the Canaanites. In both stories, we see the later justification for the Israelite’s conquest of their neighbors and confiscation of their land.
In The Bible Challenge book, each day questions are posed following the daily commentary on the texts read. After the first week of The Bible Challenge here are some points we might focus on:
The Bible Challenge
/in Uncategorized /by msutherlandUseful links:
The Bible Challenge as paperback or Kindle book http://www.forwardmovement.org/Products/2114/the-bible-challenge.aspx
or https://smile.amazon.com/Bible-Challenge-Read-Year-ebook/dp/B008R0DRX2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495031554&sr=8-1&keywords=the+bible+challenge+read+the+bible+in+a+year
Introductions
An introduction to The Bible Challenge http://www.ecfvp.org/vestry-papers/article/319/the-bible-challengeT
The Bible Challenge experience http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2012/03/26/the-bible-challenge-a-marathon-of-a-read/
Recommended Bible translations:
New King James NKJV, New International Version NIV, New Amercian Standard Bible NASB, New Revised Standard Version NRSV, New Jerusalem Bible NJB. We recommend an electronic version of the Bible which gives the option for listening as well as reading. Audio versions will be helpful if you want to listen to the daily readings while commuting or maybe before bed. Recommended Bible App for smartphones and tablets https://www.bible.com/app or Desktop Computer Bible access https://www.youversion.com/
Treasurer’s report and 2017 budget
/in Uncategorized /by msutherlandfile:///Users/markrsutherland/Downloads/St%20Martins%202017%20Annual%20Meeting.-1-22-2017.pdf
Thanksgiving 2016
/in Uncategorized /by msutherlandThis year St Martin’s will host the annual St Martin’s-Temple Beth-El Interfaith Thanksgiving Service on Tuesday, November 22nd at 7.00 pm. This year our speaker will be Kathy Cloutier, CE of Dorcas International of Rhode Island – a nonprofit dedicated to the resettlement of refugees. Thanksgiving highlights our collective experience, as a nation comprised of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, among whom a good number were refugees fleeing discrimination and violence.
Temple -Church Thanksgiving Message – also appeared as an Op-ed in The Providence Journal, Wednesday 22nd November.
On Thanksgiving Day, we will offer our usual Thanksgiving meal for those who don’t have anywhere more pressing to be. If you are coming to this and have not yet let the Office know please RSVP ASAP.
Community Carol Sing
/in Uncategorized /by msutherlandTemple-Church Conversation – First Presentation
/in Uncategorized /by msutherlandHere is the link to download the full PowerPoint presentation
temple-church-conversations-1