Letting the Bible Do Its Thing Rather Than Using it for our Own Purposes.
Diana Butler Bass has written a book entitled Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (2006)
She did some research around vital and growing mainline churches, among them Lutheran.
She writes this about them:
“All the congregations have found new vitality through an intentional and transformative engagement with a Christian tradition as embodied in faith practices. Typically, they have rediscovered the riches of the Christian past and practice simple, but profound, things like discernment, hospitality, testimony, contemplation and justice. They reach back to ancient wisdom and reach out through a life sustained by Christian devotional and moral practices. They know the biblical story and their own story. They focus more on God’s grace in the world than on the eternal state of their own souls.”
To know the biblical story is to know more than bible stories. Too often we take our sinful and self-justifying mindset and apply bible stories and morals gleaned therein to support our own agenda. They can be conservative agendas or liberal agendas or somewhere in between. To know the biblical story is to know Jesus Christ who died for our sin, destroying all self-justification, and is raised from the dead, creating a new person who trusts God alone and serves neighbor. How can we read various bible stories or accounts and come to different conclusions as to how we are to live (ethics/morality) and still remain together in mission for Christ? Because we know the biblical story. Because Christ is raised from the dead and now still raises the dead we are all alive because we are all first dead. Dead to our projects and agendas and lifestyles. And alive only in Christ. We believe in Christ, not the Bible. I know that sounds strange, if not against the faith, because we are used to talking about what we revere about God by saying we “believe in the Bible.” But we as Lutheran Christians have always seen the Bible as the “cradle that holds the Christ child” (to use a phrase of Martin Luther) where it is the Christ child, not the cradle, that is the vital (life-giving) word to us.
To honor and live out of our Lutheran identity and tradition most directly, we take the Christ from the Bible, not the Bible from the Christ.
So read your Bible. And listen for how God crucifies you and raises you from the dead, how God is faithful. When you read, instead of listening for ways for you to define yourself as faithful and correct, listen for the ways the holy breaks into the human and your identity and purpose become who God is and what God does.
Christ alone gives life. Your life does not.
The more we are dead the more we are alive.
The Bible tells us so.
