A New Kind of Christian - Chapter Six

A New Kind of Christian - Chapter Six

1. I don’t want to divide “New Christians” from “Traditional Christians” or “Postmodern Christians” from “Modern Christians”. Please help me try to avoid any “us-and-them” kind of thinking, and if you see me going in that direction, by all means tell me, OK? We’re talking about a new kind of Christian, not the new kind or a better kind or the superior kind, just a new kind.

2. One of my mottoes in life is that people are often against something worth being against but in the process find themselves for some things that aren’t worth being for. I think that’s the case with both sides of the battle about the Bible. The conservatives are against reinterpreting ancient wisdom in light of contemporary fads or moods, and they’re against in any way weakening the strong, unchanging backbone of the faith, fearing that we’ll be left with a kind of jellyfish spirituality if the liberals have their way. Meanwhile, the liberals are against pitting faith against honest scientific investigation and turning faith into an anti-intellectual enterprise. They’re against the obscurantism – the resistance to free inquiry – that is so common in conservative circles. And they’re against the privatization of faith. They feel that conservatives have retreated to the private sphere, worrying only about their own personal salvation, leaving the world at large to go to hell ecologically, culturally, in terms of social justice, that sort of thing. So I think we have to begin by saying that both sides are against something worth being against. They both have a point.

3. When evangelicals say they’re arguing about the Bible’s absolute authority, too often they are arguing about the superiority of the traditional grid through which they read and interpret the Bible.

4. How can you be sure that some of your ironclad interpretations today aren’t similarly fueling injustice? I’m wondering, if you have an infallible text, but all your interpretations of it are admittedly fallible, then you at least have to always be open to being corrected about your interpretations, right? So the authoritative text is never what I say about the text or even what I understand the text to say but rather what God means the text to say right? In other word, the authority is not in what I say the text says but in what God says the text says. Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about us. Our interpretations reveal our hearts.

5. I’m amazed by how much fear the label “liberal” elicited in me. Wouldn’t I rather be a “liberal” who really cared about God’s will than a good conservative evangelical who was smug in my understanding, who had perhaps stopped “hungering & thirsting after righteousness”?

6. I think that when you let go of the Bible as God’s answer book, you get it back as something so much better. It becomes the family story. When we let it go as a modern answer book, we get to rediscover it for what it really is: an ancient book of incredible spiritual value for us, a kind of universal and cosmic history, a book that tells us who we are and what story we find ourselves in so that we know what to do and how to live. It’s a book that calls together and helps create a community, a community that is a catalyst for God’s work in our world.