Open Blogging

Robert F says:

I have often had to struggle with the morality expressed in many Bible passages and sections, not only in the Old Testament but also in the New — these passages express a morality that has always seemed inhumane to me. I’ve partly dealt with this issue by coming to read the Bible as a whole with the recognition that it is multivocal, both with regard to interpretation and what the writers themselves meant and intended; that those writers sometime contradict each other as well as themselves; that some texts are morally sounder than others; and that all texts across the entire Bible must be seen through the lens of the figure of Jesus himself as the New Testament expresses him.

But that doesn’t totally deal with the problem, because even the central teachings and parables of Jesus himself, and texts in other parts of the Gospels, sometimes express morally troubling aspects. As an example, the Magnificat if read baldly and literally seem to say that in the Kingdom, the winners and losers are reversed, so that now the tables are inverted and the oppressor is in turn oppressed. That, frankly, does not seem like good news to me; it just seems like more of the same but in reverse order to the ways of the world now. Same with the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Sheep and the Goats, the Ten Virgins, and others: still winners and losers, only in a different arrangement.
But what if the point of many of Jesus’s teachings, and the other texts like the Magnificat, were not intended to set up a new pecking order, but to destabilize, to pull the rug out from our feet, to send us ass over teakettle, so that we are not sure anymore where we are or belong in any arrangement, so that we may stop thinking and seeing and behaving in ways that we have taken for granted until now, and start thinking and seeing and behaving in a completely different way, from the perspective of the Spirit. This is not dissimilar to the methods expressed in the ancient Zen encounter dialogues and koans, though the aims are different. This is the way I’ve come to understand much of the Bible, but especially the teaching of and about Jesus, through whom I interpret and evaluate the import of all of Scripture.

Muff Potter says:

@ Robert F,
The Bible is a good and wonderful thing, but I also think it suffers from two great ills:

1) Not giving it the credence it deserves at one extreme.

2) Making way too much of it at the other extreme.

Muff Potter says:

Michael @ 12:57 pm:
“The bombing of desalination plants is going to create a massive humanitarian crisis…”

What kind of monster would do such a thing?