Читать книгу Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith - Rob Bell - Страница 6
ОглавлениеPlease understand, I stumbled into this gig.
I was teaching waterskiing the summer after I graduated from college at a camp in northern Wisconsin called Honey Rock. My job was to drive the boat all day, drag kids around the lake, plan ski shows, and get paid $30 a week for it. Every Sunday morning the camp had a chapel service in the middle of pine trees beside the lake. One week I was with the people who were planning the service, and for some reason, when they started discussing who would give the message, I told them I would do it. I had never preached or taught or tried to explain the Bible to a group of people—I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
And they said, “You’re on this Sunday.”
I walked around the woods a lot that week, asking God to give me something to say. And if God could give it to me before Sunday, that would be great.
Sunday eventually came. I remember standing up to talk in front of those hundred or so people gathered among those pine trees and being aware of the presence of God in a terrifying way. Seriously, it was terrifying. But in a good way. The word that comes to mind is holy. I became aware of something so real, yet I couldn’t see it or touch it. I was standing there and I hadn’t said a word yet, and what did I do? I took off my sandals because I knew the ground I was standing on was holy and that my life was never, ever going to be the same again.
It was in that moment that I heard a voice. Not an audible, loud, human kind of voice, but inner words spoken somewhere in my soul that were very clear and very concise. What I heard was, “Teach this book, and I will take care of everything else.”
In that moment, my entire life changed forever. It was like a rebirth. I had been so restless and rebellious and unsettled and unfocused, and I had all this energy and passion but nowhere to channel it. Now I had something I could do with my life. In that moment by the side of a lake, barefoot, with my tongue tied and my heart on fire, I found something I could give my life to.
Or it found me.
It wasn’t planned. No angels were involved that I know of—just a young, restless soul discovering a purpose.
Like I said, I stumbled into this gig.
So for a little over ten years, I have oriented my life around studying, reading, teaching, and trying to understand the Bible. I continue to find the Bible the most mysterious book—the more insight I gain, the more I realize how much I don’t know. It inspires and encourages, and it also frustrates and provokes.
The Bible is a difficult book.
It’s Difficult
We all understand that ethnic cleansing is evil, and when someone announces that God has told him or her to kill certain people, we think that person is crazy. And yet there are passages in the Bible in which God orders “his” people to kill innocent women and children. The famous story of the people marching around the wall of Jericho, blowing their horns, and then the walls falling down is also a story about slaughter of the innocent. The text reads, “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” The section ends with this verse: “So the Lord was with Joshua.”1
God was with Joshua when he killed all those women and children?
Is God really like that?
What does a thinking, honest person do with a story like this?
And while we’re at it, what about those letters in the New Testament from one person to another group of people? Notice this verse from 2 Corinthians: “I am out of my mind to talk like this.”2 A man named Paul is writing this, so is it his word or God’s word?
Is God out of his mind?
Is God out of Paul’s mind?
Is Paul out of God’s mind?
Or does it simply mean that Paul is out of Paul’s mind?
And if the verse is simply Paul being out of Paul’s mind, then how is that God’s word?
Notice this verse from 1 Corinthians: “To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord) . . .”3 Here we have Paul writing to a group of Christians, and he wants to make it clear that the next thing he is going to say comes from him, “not the Lord.”
So when a writer of the Bible makes it clear that what he is writing comes straight from him, how is that still the word of God?
Now I think the Bible is the most amazing, beautiful, deep, inspired, engaging collection of writings ever. How is it that this ancient book continues to affect me in ways no other book does?
But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up.
Can I just say that?
Can I get that off my chest?
Sometimes when people are backing up their points and the Bible is used to prove that they are right, everything within me says, “There is no way that’s what God meant by that verse.”
Several hundred years ago people used Bible verses to defend their right to own slaves.
Recently a woman told me that she has the absolute Word of God (the Bible) and that the “opinions of man” don’t mean a thing to her. But this same woman would also tell you that she has a personal relationship with God through Jesus. In fact, she spends a great deal of time telling people they need a personal relationship with God through Jesus. What is interesting to me is that the phrase “personal relationship” isn’t found anywhere in the Bible. Someone made up this phrase and then said you could have one with God. Apparently the “opinions of man” do mean something to her.
I was reading last year in one of the national news magazines about a gathering of the leaders of a massive Christian denomination (literally millions of members worldwide). The reason their annual gathering was in the news was that they had voted to reaffirm their view of the importance of the verse that says a wife’s role is to submit to her husband.
This is a big deal to them.
This is what made news.
This is what they are known for.
What about the verse before that verse?
What about the verse after it?
What about the verse that talks about women having authority over their husbands?4
What about all of the marriages in which this verse has been used to oppress and mistreat women?
It is possible to make the Bible say whatever we want it to, isn’t it?
How is it that the Bible can be so many different things to so many different people?
Nazis, cult leaders, televangelists who promise that God will bless you if you just get out your checkbook, racists, people who oppress minorities and the poor and anyone not like them—they all can find verses in the Bible to back up their agendas.
We have all heard the Bible used in certain ways and found ourselves asking, “Oh God, you couldn’t have meant that, could you?”
Somebody recently told me, “As long as you teach the Bible, I have no problem with you.”
Think about that for a moment.
What that person was really saying is, “As long as you teach my version of the Bible, I’ll have no problem with you.” And the more people insist that they are just taking the Bible for what it says, the more skeptical I get.
Which for me raises one huge question: Is the Bible the best God can do?
With God being so massive and awe-inspiring and full of truth, why is his book capable of so much confusion?
Why did God do it this way?
Where does one go in trying to make sense of what the Bible even is, let alone what it says?
For me, clarity has begun to emerge when I’ve begun to understand what Jesus believed about the scriptures.
Let’s start with a straightforward verse from the book of Leviticus: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”5
Could there be a more basic verse? “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Who could possibly have any sort of problem with this verse?
And how could someone mess this up?
What could be complicated about loving your neighbor?
Even people who don’t believe in God and don’t read the Bible would say that loving your neighbor is a good thing to do.
A couple of questions this verse raises: How do we live this verse out? What does it mean to love? What isn’t love? Who decides what is love and what isn’t love?
And what about your neighbor? Who is your neighbor? Is your neighbor only the person next door, or is it anyone you have contact with? Or is it every single human being on the face of the planet?
And what happens if one person’s definition of love and another person’s definition differ? Who is right? Who is wrong? Who decides who is right and who is wrong? Who decides if whoever decided made the right decision?
So even a verse as basic as this raises more questions than it answers.
In order to live it out and not just talk about it, someone somewhere has to make decisions about this verse. Someone has to decide what it actually looks like to put flesh and blood on this command.
And that’s because the Bible is open-ended.
It has to be interpreted. And if it isn’t interpreted, then it can’t be put into action. So if we are serious about following God, then we have to interpret the Bible. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. We must first make decisions about what it means at this time, in this place, for these people.
Here’s another example from the Torah (the Jewish name for the first five books of the Bible): “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.”6 The next verses command the people to do no work on this Sabbath day; they then explain the command by saying that God rested on the seventh day after creating the world in the first six days.
You can already see the questions this verse raises: Who defines work? Who defines rest? What if work to one person is rest to another? What if rest to one person is work to another? And what does it mean to make a day holy? How do you know if you’ve kept something holy? How would you know if you hadn’t?
Once again, the Bible is open-ended. It has to be interpreted.
Somebody has to decide what it means to love your neighbor, and somebody has to decide what it means to observe the Sabbath and keep it holy.
Rabbis
Now the ancient rabbis understood that the Bible is open-ended and has to be interpreted. And they understood that their role in the community was to study and meditate and discuss and pray and then make those decisions. Rabbis are like interpreters, helping people understand what God is saying to them through the text and what it means to live out the text.
Take for example the Sabbath command in Exodus. A rabbi would essentially put actions in two categories: things the rabbi permitted on the Sabbath and things the rabbi forbade on the Sabbath. The rabbi was driven by a desire to get as close as possible to what God originally intended in the command at hand. One rabbi might say that you could walk so far on the Sabbath, but if you went farther, that would be work and you would be violating the Sabbath. Another might permit you to walk farther but forbid you to do certain actions another rabbi might permit.
Different rabbis had different sets of rules, which were really different lists of what they forbade and what they permitted. A rabbi’s set of rules and lists, which was really that rabbi’s interpretation of how to live the Torah, was called that rabbi’s yoke. When you followed a certain rabbi, you were following him because you believed that rabbi’s set of interpretations were the closest to what God intended through the scriptures. And when you followed that rabbi, you were taking up that rabbi’s yoke.
One rabbi even said his yoke was easy.7
The intent then of a rabbi having a yoke wasn’t just to interpret the words correctly; it was to live them out. In the Jewish context, action was always the goal. It still is.
Rabbis would spend hours discussing with their students what it meant to live out a certain text. If a student made a suggestion about what a certain text meant and the rabbi thought the student had totally missed the point, the rabbi would say, “You have abolished the Torah,” which meant that in the rabbi’s opinion, the student wasn’t anywhere near what God wanted. But if the student got it right, if the rabbi thought the student had grasped God’s intention in the text, the rabbi would say, “You have fulfilled the Torah.”
Notice what Jesus says in one of his first messages: “I have not come to abolish [the Torah] but to fulfill [it].”8 He was essentially saying, “I didn’t come to do away with the words of God; I came to show people what it looks like when the Torah is lived out perfectly, right down to the smallest punctuation marks.”
“I’m here to put flesh and blood on the words.”9
Most rabbis taught the yoke of a well respected rabbi who had come before them. So if you visited a synagogue and the local rabbi (Torah teacher) was going to teach, you might hear that this rabbi teaches in the name of Rabbi So-and-So. If you were familiar with the yoke of Rabbi So-and-So, then you would know what to expect from this rabbi.
Every once in a while, a rabbi would come along who was teaching a new yoke, a new way of interpreting the Torah. This was rare and extraordinary.
Imagine: A rabbi was claiming that he had a new way to understand the scriptures that was closer to what God intended than the way of the rabbis who had come before him. A new take on the scriptures.
The questions would immediately be raised: “How do we know this is truth? How do we know this rabbi isn’t crazy?” One of the protections for the rabbi in this case was that two other rabbis with authority would lay hands on the rabbi and essentially validate him. They would be saying, “We believe this rabbi has authority to make new interpretations.” That’s why Jesus’s baptism was so important. John the Baptist was a powerful teacher and prophet who was saying publicly that he wasn’t worthy to carry Jesus’s sandals.10
“And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’”11
A second voice affirmed Jesus’s unique calling. The voice of God.
Amazing.
A Jewish audience reading Matthew’s account of Jesus’s baptism would pick up right away on Jesus’s getting the affirmation of two powerful voices.12
Which leads to an interesting scene: In the book of Luke, what is the one question the religious leaders keep hounding Jesus with?
“Where did you get your authority?”
Jesus’s response? “You tell me, where did John get his?”13
Now imagine if a rabbi who had a new perspective on the Torah was coming to town. This rabbi who was making new interpretations of the Torah was said to have authority. The Hebrew word for “authority” is shmikah. This might not even happen in your lifetime. You would hike for miles to hear him.
A rabbi who taught with shmikah would say things like, “You have heard it said . . . , but I tell you. . . .”14
What he was saying is, “You have heard people interpret that verse this way, but I tell you that this is what God really means in that verse.”
Now the rabbis had technical terms for this endless process of forbidding and permitting and making interpretations. They called it “binding and loosing.” To “bind” something was to forbid it. To “loose” something was to allow it.15
So a rabbi would bind certain practices and loose other practices. And when he gave his disciples the authority to bind and loose, it was called “giving the keys of the kingdom.”
Notice what Jesus says in the book of Matthew: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”16
What he is doing here is significant. He is giving his followers the authority to make new interpretations of the Bible. He is giving them permission to say, “Hey, we think we missed it before on that verse, and we’ve recently come to the conclusion that this is what it actually means.”
And not only is he giving them authority, but he is saying that when they do debate and discuss and pray and wrestle and then make decisions about the Bible, somehow God in heaven will be involved.
Our Turn
Jesus expects his followers to be engaged in the endless process of deciding what it means to actually live the scriptures. And right away in the life of this new movement, we see them doing it. In Acts 15, these first Christians find themselves having to make a huge decision about what it means to be a Christian.
To understand what they are facing, we have to understand that they are Jewish—Jewish believers who are circumcised and eat kosher and recite Jewish prayers and celebrate Jewish feasts.
Jewish followers of a Jewish messiah who live a Jewish life in a Jewish nation.
But all sorts of Gentiles (people who aren’t Jewish) start becoming followers of Jesus. People who don’t eat kosher, who aren’t circumcised, who don’t dress and talk and look and live like them.
So what do they do? Do they expect all of these Gentiles to start being Jewish?
And what exactly would that mean? What would that look like? (Grown men being told that if they are really serious about becoming Christians, there’s a little surgery they need to have . . .)
The first Christians know that Jesus is for everybody, but what do they do with all of these Jewish laws they follow? So they convene a council (yeshiva in Hebrew) to discuss it.
After hearing all sides of the issue, they decide to forbid (or should we say they bind?) several things.17
Here is why this is so important: They have to make decisions about what it means to be a Christian.
They actually do it. They gather together and make interpretations of the Bible regarding what it will look like for millions of people to be Christians.
I wonder if one of them stood up at any point and said, “Jesus gave us the authority to do this, didn’t he?”
Now let’s move things into our world. If we take Jesus seriously and actually see it as our responsibility to bind and loose, the implications are endless, serious, and exhilarating.
The Bible is a communal book. It came from people writing in communities, and it was often written to communities. Remember that the printing press wasn’t invented until the 1400s. Prior to that, very few if any people had their own copies of the Bible. In Jesus’s day, an entire village could probably afford only one copy of the scriptures, if that. Reading the Bible alone was unheard of, if people could even read. For most of church history, people heard the Bible read aloud in a room full of people. You heard it, discussed it, studied it, argued about it, and made decisions about it as a group, a community. Most of the “yous” in the Bible are plural. Groups of people receiving these words. So if one person went off the deep end with an interpretation or opinion, the others were right there to keep that person in check. In a synagogue, most of the people knew the text by heart. When someone got up to teach or share insight, chances are everybody knew the text that person was talking on and already had their own opinions about it. You saw yourself and those around you as taking part in a huge discussion that has gone on for thousands of years.
Because God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.
Contrast this communal way of reading and discussing and learning with our Western, highly individualized culture. In many Christian settings, people are even encouraged to read the Bible alone, which is a new idea in church history. A great idea and a life-changing discipline, but a new idea. And think of pastors. Many pastors study alone all week, stand alone in front of the church and talk about the Bible, and then receive mail and phone calls from individuals who agree or don’t agree with what they said. This works for a lot of communities, but it isn’t the only way.
And it can’t be the only way if we take seriously Jesus’s call to be binding and loosing, which must be done in community. In fact, binding and loosing can only be done in community with others who are equally passionate about being true to the words of God.
