NOSTALGIA
Remember back when the Church allegedly burned people at the stake for translating the Bible into various national languages so people could read it on their own? Ah, thinks George Clifford, sadly and wistfully. Those were the days:
For years, I, like most clergy, frequently and indiscriminately exhorted Christians to pick up a Bible and read it. No more. I have realized that this advice, although well intentioned, is usually counterproductive, causing more disaffection from Christianity and guilt than spiritual growth.
Why is that, George? Because the idiots in the pews aren’t intelligent enough to know what it is that they’re reading.
The Bible, written over a period of more than one thousand years, contains multiple diverse worldviews, all of them foreign to twenty-first century life in the United States. The person who genuinely wants to understand the biblical text benefits by beginning with good introductions to both the Old Testament and New Testament. These provide overviews of important historical, linguistic, textual, and literary issues. Commentaries and Bible dictionaries offer more specific assistance related to particular passages.
In other words, to read the Bible with even a moderate level of informed comprehension, a reader needs to invest substantial time and effort in acquiring the knowledge and skills that seminarians generally learn in their first year or two of biblical studies. In contrast to the pseudo-scholars with their interlinear versions, developing the linguistic knowledge to appreciate and ponder the text in Hebrew or Greek requires even more years of work.
Translation: don’t try this at home. Just stick to your Danielle Steel or your John Grisham or whatever other brain-dead crap you people read and leave the Bible alone because only highly-trained professionals like us are able to tell you what it means. Nothing good can come of letting you people read your Bibles unsupervised.
Beginning when I was in seminary over three decades ago, I have frequently heard seminarians lament the alienation and disaffection that they experienced as they began their biblical studies.
Devotional reading of the Bible had nurtured their faith and often played an instrumental role in the spiritual journey that led them to seminary en route to seeking ordination. Now their academic studies challenged, if not actually contradicted, what they believed was the Word of God they had previously heard in their devotional reading of beloved texts.
Søren? Want to field that one?
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
Thanks, man. But you don’t get it, says Clifford. Let people read Bibles by themselves and who knows what weird crap they might start believing.
Devotional reading was the pervasive approach among Bible reading Protestants – whether mainline Church members, evangelicals, or fundamentalists – to whom I ministered in the Navy. These good people considered themselves Christians in spite of both their theological ignorance and (being kind) eccentricities.
On the one hand, the reader may uncritically accept the text as authoritative and adopt an unscientific (creation in seven days; people walking on water), unhistorical (hundreds of thousands of slaves exiting Egypt; the slaughter of innocents), and theologically bogus (God ordering mass slaughter; women subservient to men) reading.
Unfortunately, the Episcopal Church is complicit in giving people this unfortunate choice. In sermons, confirmation classes, and other venues – most recently, a campaign to get people to read the Bible through in a year – we regularly encourage people to pick up the Bible and read it. Bible studies typically consist of the blind leading the blind: well-meaning, devout believers telling one another what God is saying to them through a particular text. Lectio divina is similar: listen to the text and hear the Holy Spirit speak to you.
Ballgame, thanks for playing. Nobody and I mean NOBODY does sneering theological condescension better than Episcopalians.
Do you the best way to evaluate a particular church? Read a statement of its theological positions? Evaluate its theology based on how closely it adheres to the Bible and the theology of the Church as a whole?
No and no. The best way to evaluate a church is to evaluate the kinds of people it produces. And there’s only one effective place to do that.
Coffee hour.
When I was still part of it, the Episcopal Church used to publicly say nice things about other churches and worked with other churches all the time. Even today, many Episcopalians profess great respect for Catholic saints and various aspects of the Catholic tradition, even to the point of giving Catholic names to their “religious orders.”
The term “Anglo-Catholic” exists for a reason.
I don’t really care what you publicly proclaim. I do care what you say in private when you think no one is listening. And I have never heard more visceral contempt toward other Christian traditions than I used to hear while walking around my Episcopal parish dining hall with a cup of coffee in my hand.
Is Clifford concerned about heresy taking hold in someone’s life? Yes and no. He is not at all concerned about the possibility that you might read your Bible, go off, start some kind of cult and begin speaking in tongues or something.
But George is concerned, gravely concerned, that you might read your Bible, decide that, “Biblical scholarship” notwithstanding, it means exactly what it says, conclude that the Episcopal Church is dead wrong about practically everything and join the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Southern Baptist or some other Christian church that actually believes all this mythological garbage.
After all, if Romans 10:9 has a specific cultural context and if its meaning can only be interpreted by trained professionals and no one else, the Christian religion is worthless.
For years, I, like most clergy, frequently and indiscriminately exhorted Christians to pick up a Bible and read it. No more. I have realized that this advice, although well intentioned, is usually counterproductive, causing more disaffection from Christianity and guilt than spiritual growth.
Why is that, George? Because the idiots in the pews aren’t intelligent enough to know what it is that they’re reading.
The Bible, written over a period of more than one thousand years, contains multiple diverse worldviews, all of them foreign to twenty-first century life in the United States. The person who genuinely wants to understand the biblical text benefits by beginning with good introductions to both the Old Testament and New Testament. These provide overviews of important historical, linguistic, textual, and literary issues. Commentaries and Bible dictionaries offer more specific assistance related to particular passages.
In other words, to read the Bible with even a moderate level of informed comprehension, a reader needs to invest substantial time and effort in acquiring the knowledge and skills that seminarians generally learn in their first year or two of biblical studies. In contrast to the pseudo-scholars with their interlinear versions, developing the linguistic knowledge to appreciate and ponder the text in Hebrew or Greek requires even more years of work.
Translation: don’t try this at home. Just stick to your Danielle Steel or your John Grisham or whatever other brain-dead crap you people read and leave the Bible alone because only highly-trained professionals like us are able to tell you what it means. Nothing good can come of letting you people read your Bibles unsupervised.
Beginning when I was in seminary over three decades ago, I have frequently heard seminarians lament the alienation and disaffection that they experienced as they began their biblical studies.
Devotional reading of the Bible had nurtured their faith and often played an instrumental role in the spiritual journey that led them to seminary en route to seeking ordination. Now their academic studies challenged, if not actually contradicted, what they believed was the Word of God they had previously heard in their devotional reading of beloved texts.
Søren? Want to field that one?
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
Thanks, man. But you don’t get it, says Clifford. Let people read Bibles by themselves and who knows what weird crap they might start believing.
Devotional reading was the pervasive approach among Bible reading Protestants – whether mainline Church members, evangelicals, or fundamentalists – to whom I ministered in the Navy. These good people considered themselves Christians in spite of both their theological ignorance and (being kind) eccentricities.
On the one hand, the reader may uncritically accept the text as authoritative and adopt an unscientific (creation in seven days; people walking on water), unhistorical (hundreds of thousands of slaves exiting Egypt; the slaughter of innocents), and theologically bogus (God ordering mass slaughter; women subservient to men) reading.
Unfortunately, the Episcopal Church is complicit in giving people this unfortunate choice. In sermons, confirmation classes, and other venues – most recently, a campaign to get people to read the Bible through in a year – we regularly encourage people to pick up the Bible and read it. Bible studies typically consist of the blind leading the blind: well-meaning, devout believers telling one another what God is saying to them through a particular text. Lectio divina is similar: listen to the text and hear the Holy Spirit speak to you.
Ballgame, thanks for playing. Nobody and I mean NOBODY does sneering theological condescension better than Episcopalians.
Do you the best way to evaluate a particular church? Read a statement of its theological positions? Evaluate its theology based on how closely it adheres to the Bible and the theology of the Church as a whole?
No and no. The best way to evaluate a church is to evaluate the kinds of people it produces. And there’s only one effective place to do that.
Coffee hour.
When I was still part of it, the Episcopal Church used to publicly say nice things about other churches and worked with other churches all the time. Even today, many Episcopalians profess great respect for Catholic saints and various aspects of the Catholic tradition, even to the point of giving Catholic names to their “religious orders.”
The term “Anglo-Catholic” exists for a reason.
I don’t really care what you publicly proclaim. I do care what you say in private when you think no one is listening. And I have never heard more visceral contempt toward other Christian traditions than I used to hear while walking around my Episcopal parish dining hall with a cup of coffee in my hand.
Is Clifford concerned about heresy taking hold in someone’s life? Yes and no. He is not at all concerned about the possibility that you might read your Bible, go off, start some kind of cult and begin speaking in tongues or something.
But George is concerned, gravely concerned, that you might read your Bible, decide that, “Biblical scholarship” notwithstanding, it means exactly what it says, conclude that the Episcopal Church is dead wrong about practically everything and join the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Southern Baptist or some other Christian church that actually believes all this mythological garbage.
After all, if Romans 10:9 has a specific cultural context and if its meaning can only be interpreted by trained professionals and no one else, the Christian religion is worthless.
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