Well, for one thing, the Christ, as Head over the church, gifted the body with pastors and teachers and evangelists and prophets for a reason. People need to be taught (and reminded and encouraged).
For another, there are many scholarly teachers whose late-in-life remarks tended towards a desire for more life (lives) to study the Scriptures more - they felt there was plenty more to be mined.
For another, scripture has teaching and learning opportunities at all levels of knowledge and understanding and experience and maturity.
For another, 2015 is not 1615 nor 515.. Times change and the world as it is now is certainly not what it was then, or then, nor what it was when the traditions were penned.
For another, to wish the scriptures were math-ish, 2+2=4, and so everything contained there could be so organized and formatted such that a person with enough time and attention could 'master' the two-times table of scriptural truth is tantamount to reducing revelation to rote simplistic lessons to be learned on the school bench.
This is history, poetry, storytelling, prophecy, apocalyptic, parable. It is literature in all its varied grandeur, and that is not math - it is life. And it is told in all its horror and splendor, humanly, with a twist of Godview, divine worldview.
To attempt to codify it, define it, boundary it, even to dogmatize it or overly systematize it, is to reduce its glory to legalistic propositions, and that benefits no one, save for those who live in the fear it could be wrong, or doubted, or assailed by logic or argument of some kind. It would be to transform the beauty of it to mere words and disputed formulae, and that sucks all the umph out of it, surely.
There lies as much meat as a person can consume, as much depth, as much breadth, wonder, confundity, and profundity as one is willing to undergo in effort, in thought, meditation, consideration for a lifetime.
It is subject to varied meanings because I am not today what I was 20 years ago, neither am I that person over there, or that person across the sea in a markedly different culture.
The, to me, marvel of Scripture is its speakability to different people at different times in different places with different circumstances, and surely what it says to me could well be far different to what it says to you in your place.
The spirit of God does that. The Spirit speaks and witnesses to my spirit the things of Scripture to grow me, to call me, to move me, to change me, to impassion, to sober, to point, to break me down, and some other day build me up, strengthen today, bring me to my knees tomorrow.
Jesus himself made parable his trademark teaching mode, and parable strikes at the heart, calls for introversion, head-scratching, assaults, confounds, questions me, beckons me out of my know-it, bombard my conscience.
To reduce that to a simplified lesson is to unjustly do it much injustice.
No, Scripture is not quantifiable like a weights and measures table, nor learnable like some poem to be recited mindlessly. It is a powerful tool, able to strip the human of any sense of 'I know' and leave them in wonder at the awe of God and the awe-ful tendency of humanity towards control and the power to judge.
Scripture deserves to be honored for its flexibility, its ability to transcend time and circumstance, to strike me down here in 2015, right where I am, even as it did in quite a different way 2000 years ago, wielded by the selfsame spirit of God.
It deserves that freedom, that passion, that power, and that can only be mined by the mind willing always to learn, to relearn, to learn anew under that Spirit's guidance.Seek not to know it, but to experience it
not to master, but be mastered by it ..
peace to you
No comments:
Post a Comment