I've been thinking a lot over the last few months about what I really believe about the Bible. I've encountered very conservative, all-or-nothing, literalist interpretations, all head-in-the-sand stubbornness and exhausting argumentativeness. Then there's the ultra-rational, 'it's-not-scientific-therefore-it-has-no-value-and-is-probably-dangerously-primitive' point of view which seems to me sad, reductionist and banal.
NT Wright, CS Lewis and Tim Keller seem to be my preferred ploughers of more nuanced, humane and imaginitive furrows through the fretful field of Biblical bias. I'm warming to Brian McLaren too at the moment, as I read his 'Naked Spirituality'.
Something he says (in a footnote) about Moses and the burning bush got me thinking. It was to do with literal interpretation of events. He basically states his position that it doesn't matter in what way the story is 'true', because whatever way you slice it, it marks a great watershed in our experience of the awesomeness, and yet the closeness of God. And that got me thinking - I think as evangelicals we expect people who are not Christians to believe things which are, let's be honest, pretty preposterous. And I think we have absolutely no right to expect this. (obviously, people can believe all kinds of preposterous things without the influence of Christians, but that's beside the point).
So what comes to my mind at the moment is this: we cannot expect people to believe in the supernatural events the Bible records if they haven't sumbitted themselves to the Person of Jesus. Without a direct experience of the living God, we are imprisoned by unbelief. You can argue all you want with an atheist about the existence of angels, or burning bushes, or virgin births, but I just don't think that atheist will accept your reasoning without a direct and personal revelation from God.
But when that person turns the handle to the gentle, persistent knock of Jesus on the door of their lives, suddenly anything becomes possible. It isn't that brains and reason suddenly walk out as Jesus walks in. That suggests to me an unnecessary dualism. Rather it has something to do with the re-ordering (the re-creating actually) of our inner being which happens when we encounter Christ. When the myth of self-centredness (the myth that 'the world revolves round me') - when this myth is debunked by our awakening to the conquering, self-sacrificing presence of a God who really does love and care for us - when this happens, and only when this happens, we can enter into the deeper mythology of the infinite-and-yet-incarnate spiritual reality which God inhabits, and into which he invites us to plunge.
I struggled to believe in the supernatural stories in the Bible before I had a supernatural encounter with God. Now... what do I think? I am more inclined to believe they are true. What do I mean by 'true'? Were they empirically true all along, or does their 'truth' need to be unlocked by my belief? A rational voice says to me: 'believe that stuff, and you'll believe anything'. In the words of Mulder from X-Files though, I WANT to believe. More than that, I'm compelled to believe by what has happened to me. I didn't break into my own life and change it. No. I cried out to the darkness and (who knew!) there was something there. Not a watertight, abstract, all-figured-out, intellectual answer, like the one we so often hold out and with which we try to win minds to Christ. But rather... something like a moment, a meeting. A decisive moment, although it wasn't clear whether it was me making the decisive move, or the something there in the darkness that met me. The only way it makes sense to me is that it wasn't a someTHING - a system, a rule, a product - it was a someONE: a Spirit, a Father, a Friend. Systems and arguments and evidence can't forgive someone. Only a Person can do that.
All of this I guess is a long way of trying to say: why should anyone believe in the Biblically supernatural if they don't believe in the personally supernatural? Once the Person has been embraced, the rest starts to fall into place, starts to have truth, meaning, power. Questioning the validity of the Bible's historical accounts, pithy explainings, poetical questionings, and prophetic reverberations somehow seems of secondary importance next their place within the power and the presence and the transformative yearning urging loving closeness of the Person, that is, Christ. Why care for the Bible unless it show me Christ? Why study the Bible unless it enlargen Christ? Why argue about the Bible, unless it argue for Christ? Why draw conclusions about the Bible unless it conclude for Christ?
The irony of being an evangelical, is that in order to have a high view of the Bible, one must lower his view of the Bible, for the Bible itself bends the knee to the Person. A merry dance indeed, it leads us! But it leads us, ultimately, back to the Person. All the angels and demons and burning bushes and talking donkeys and Virgin Mothers and wise men and prophets and the whole unlikely and preposterous cast of thousands and millions and billions who have lived and breathed and hoped and despaired and triumphed and failed and hoped again and faded and finally, or not finally, given up the ghost only to grasp the great white hope of heaven itself with the weak and broken and slippery butter fingers of humanity - all, in the end of the ends, which might just be a beginning, all bend the knee to the Person. And so do I.
That's where the Bible really gets going for me. If you are skeptical about the Bible (and why shoudn't you be?) then open your eyes to the possibility of the Person about whom it is written. And ask, seek, knock, DARE to cry out to the darkness!
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