I picked up a book recently that caught my eye. Its title: The Badly Behaved Bible by Nick Page. (1) He writes:
'We're told that reading the Bible is a Life-giving and Good Thing which Every Proper Christian Should Do with Joy in Our Hearts. And yet, instead, significant chunks of it are overwhelmingly verbose, completely irrelevant, incomprehensible or so mind-numbingly dull that we begin to lose the will to live.' (2)
With humour he shows how the Bible is full of violence, unseemly behaviour, contradictory (and sometimes chilling) pictures of God. It's full of mixed messages. This (he says) easily leads to 'cognitive dissonance' for the person who thinks that they ought to believe and find inspiration in the Bible.
Page goes on to argue that the Bible never claims to be 'God-written' but 'God-inspired'. The text is imperfectly written and assembled by human beings over many ages. Yet God 'breathes' into it in a miraculous way. He confronts us there, challenges us, finds us, and transforms us through it. Thus we should not be preoccupied with the form of the Bible. We should not expect it to conform to our modern ideas of historical accuracy, or frustrate ourself by seeing it as a rule book to be followed literally (where that is clearly impossible). Rather, we should focus on what happens in us as we engage with it.
In the New Church we agree that we ought to read the Word. It is through the Word that the Lord meets and transforms us. And, yes, it often appears crude, imperfect and at times contradictory. (3) But we believe that its ancient text was ordered from within by the Lord (without the conscious knowledge of its earthly writers) so that its symbolic narrative conveys timeless truths about our spiritual life. In fact, there is a continuous internal meaning running through it! This makes it easier to accept the Word as something that can connect us with God.
…But do you find the Word easy to read?
It takes patience, doesn't it? — to discern God's presence and leading in its pages? None of us (not even ministers) easily jump to the internal sense, and 'read' that sense in any full way. So we are all faced with the challenge of finding meaning, relevance, and edification in our reading.
Most of the time we must read in a spirit of devotion, with humble expectations about what we will or won't find — with the conviction that God is nevertheless there.
So I think we'd agree that our focus in reading the Word should not be too much on the form but on what happens in us as we engage with it, over time.
Now, I want to make the point that this is true of all Divine revelation. The Writings for the New Church are similar to previous revelations in that they are written by a human being who was guided from within by the Lord. They were written in time and space, in a culture increasingly receding into the past. And if we judge them on the surface, from our popular sensibilities, we can be put off.
In their form the Writings often seem repetitive, verbose, clumsy, scientifically and historically inaccurate. The terminology can be mind-numbing — 'the internal of the external','discrete degrees', 'the celestial of the spiritual from the natural'….(4) Nevertheless, when we patiently engage with the Writings, the Lord meets us there and leads us in wonderful ways. They take us to places we would never go on our own, life-giving places. The Lord's Spirit breathes into them as He does into all revelation.
Now it helps to know that everything in the Lord's Word — Old Testament, New Testament, and Heavenly Doctrine — is really about loving God and loving our neighbour. On these two things 'hang all the Law and the Prophets'. (5) When we approach the Word with this (and with other clear, leading truths) in mind, its meaning opens to us. These 'genuine truths' that stand out plainly in the letter of the Word are the key! (6)
So let us take seriously the imperative of reading the Word — the Old Testament, New Testament, and Writings. Let us read them with patience, not letting matters of form distract us from the way the text, with our reverent and open approach, can bring life-giving sustenance and spiritual transformation.
Footnotes
