I am nearing the end of the book by Kugel and have come to some startling conclusions. This book, purchased by my wife at a book fair for a very low price, with the idea in her mind that it “might interest” me, captivated me like no other. I have gone over my background here several times, so I won’t go over that again. But for a long time I have wondered if my faith in the Scriptures would one day be exchanged for an intellectual set of “truths” in my own mind. As I absorb more, I actually find my faith increasing, but the source of my faith shifting.
As I begin to dig beyond and behind the texts that eventually became canon and then “Holy Scripture” to the followers of Christ, I begin to find that the scriptures had become for many a replacement for faith. The Bible has become holy and worthy of worship and praise instead of the one whom the Scriptures speak of. The Bible has become sacred and revered to the point of idolatry.
I can remember my mother, the most instrumental guide in my early training, counseling me to never sit anything on top of a Bible. She also encouraged me to not use the Bible as a filing cabinet or flower press. Dropping the Bible wasn’t a sin or a crime, but should be avoided at all times. I personally think dropping any book, or anything for that matter, should be avoided if possible. I find myself dropping more of about every thing as I get older and give up fingers in the process. The Bible itself took on an unwarranted fragility. One would never toss their Bible on the sofa or table. One would PLACE their Bible in a place out of harms way.
Beyond the Bible becoming an idol of sorts, the text contained in the Bible became living instructions defacto. We were always cautioned and admonished to consult the Bible before any decision. Decisions of consequence. You might choose a toothpaste without consulting the Bible, but you’d never choose a place to live or a vehicle, decisions of larger value, without much prayer and Bible consultation. Well, at least you shouldn’t.
Careers, partners, or anything that would consume major portions of your time or finances were to be prayed about and placed against the judgments of the Bible.
I am not against inviting divine direction into decision making, but I am against the implied council one can receive about decisions that would not have been possible when the ancient texts were written. I really doubt that God has any opinion as to the make of vehicle we drive. The only vehicle mentioned in the Bible as far as I know is the one Accord the disciples were in when Pentecost came. Sorry, it just somehow led up to that.
I am leading into quoting a lengthy section from Kugel’s book in the last chapter titled After Such Knowledge… In this quote Kugel is talking about Judaism. After reading the entire book I see this quote equally applied to Catholicism and Protestantism. Kugal makes that association in other places.
“In Judaism, scripture is ultimately valued not as history, nor as theology, nor even as the great, self-sufficient corpus of divine utterance-all that God had ever wished to say to man. Judaism is not fundamentalism, nor even Protestantism. What Scripture is, and always has been, in Judaism is the beginning of a manual entitled To Serve God, a manual whose trajectory has always led from the prophet to the interpreter and from the divine to the merely human. To put the matter in, I admit, rather shocking terms; since in Judaism it is not the words of Scripture themselves that are ultimately supreme, but the service of God (the “standing up close”) that they enjoin, then to suggest that everything hangs on Scripture might well be described as a form of fetishism or idolatry, that is, a mistaking of the message for its Sender and the turning of its words into idols of wood or stone. For Judaism, the crucial element in Scripture has always been the imperative that Scripture’s very existence embodies (and the changed apprehension that underlies that imperative) the basic divine commandment reflected in Deuteronomy’s exhortation “to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul” (Deuteronomy 10:12) and similar pronouncements. To flesh out this commandment was the purpose of all Scripture and all later interpretation. With such a purpose foremost, the Bible’s original component texts easily lent themselves to flexible reinterpretation. As a matter of fact, a fossilized, petrified meaning would, soon enough, end up betraying this purpose of Scripture by making it outmoded and obsolete.”
OK, I realize that is a lot to take in. Especially since you haven’t read the 695 pages of research and study prior to this paragraph. The essence of the paragraph can be boiled down to this, at least for me, that the Scriptures, or the Bible, is not about the words contained in the books, chapters and verses as much as it is about drawing close to God, or in the author’s words, “standing close to God.” Basically, everyone’s interpretation is derived from meanings assigned to events, characters, laws and precepts to them by interpreters who lived in the 3rd, 2nd and 1st century BCE. It was about that time that the interpreters begin to put into form meaning and connotation to the ancient texts that would in 325 CE at the Council of Nicaea become canon Scripture for the rising and spreading Christian community.
I know of no ministers or teachers who have in my lifetime had any original thoughts on Scripture interpretation. There may have been some, but I am not aware of any. Many ministers and teachers come up with new and innovative ways of illustrating or painting word pictures of Scriptural precepts, but the precepts remain unchanged. And if you understand the life of Christ that was the method he employed to plant the seeds of the gospel in the hearts of those who would give him audience.
I sit under a minister now that has a wonderful gift of clarity in story telling. Not fabricated stories or fairy tales, but personal stories from his own past and others he knows. And in telling these stories, he brings out lucid illustrations of Scriptural interpretation that is novel and quickening. He looks at principles from different angles and perspectives that are new to us the listeners so that the principles stick in our memories in new ways.
I am sure everyone understands that we learn so much in our time while on time’s side of eternity, (and forget as much as 90 percent of what we’ve learned) but relearning those lessons in new ways redraws the precepts in our memories. So new ways of presentation is always in order.
But the precepts and interpretation of Scripture has not changed significantly in over 2000 years. And the precepts and interpretations that have endured the test of time were, keep in mind, the result of men, humans like those we know in 2009, agreeing on what the meaning of the ancient text was then.
Anytime the human is involved, the ability for misinformation and flaws is rampant. To place our total trust in human interpretation of Scripture is to put ourselves at risk, and to elevate the human interpretation to a higher level than the creator of the Scriptures. That is idolatry. You can find it in the Book.
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