A New Kind of Christian - Chapter Seven

What if faith isn't best compared to a building, but rather to a spider web? Instead of one foundation, it has several anchor points. Those points might be spiritual
experiences, exemplary people and institutions that one has come to trust, that sort of thing.

Where does the Bible fit in? It could be seen as one of the anchor points.
Or perhaps every passage in the Bible that has affected your life could be seen as an
anchor point. Or perhaps the Bible isn't only in the anchor points. Perhaps it is part of every thread of the web.

John Wesley - he was an Anglican - understood this very well. He talked about
the church deriving its stability from a dynamic interplay of four forces: Scripture,
tradition, reason, and spiritual experience.

One thing that both modern liberals and conservatives have in common is that
they read the Bible in very modern ways. Modern conservatives read the Bible like a
modern history text, a modern encyclopedia, a modern science article or a modern legal code. But none of those categories even existed when the Bible was written. Modern liberals acknowledge that the Bible is a different kind of text from our modern texts, but then they in a sense judge it by modern standards. If something doesn't fit in with a modern Western mind-set that reveres objectivity, science, democracy, individualism, that sort of thing, it is dismissed as primitive and irrelevant. Maybe neither liberals nor conservatives take the Bible seriously enough.

Maybe we need to read the Bible less like scholars and more like humble seekers
trying to learn whatever we can from it. in the context of our sincere desire to live for God and do what he wants. Maybe postmodern is post-analytical and post-critical. What if instead of reading the Bible, you let the Bible read you?

Maybe our approach to the Bible is that we flirt with it, romance it - or maybe let
its message romance us. I wonder what would happen if we honestly listened to the
story and put ourselves under its spell, so to speak, not using it to get all of our
questions about God answered but instead trusting God to use it to pose questions to usabout us. What would happen if we just trusted ourselves to it - the way a boy opens his heart to a girl. The Benedictines practice something like this; they call it lectio divina.