I have been musing for a while about scripture; where it comes from; who decides that it is scripture and how it happens that someone or some ones decides that enough is enough and now it is completed.
This has sort of bubbled forth from my annoyance at the circular arguments that scripture (of any sort) tends to generate. If one is debating or questioning some of the key issues of faith it seems to me to be odd to use the very scripture of the faith that one is discussing in order to verify the point.
Do you get what I mean?
I remember when I lived in Malaysia, that I bought a religious book by some Muslim “scholars”. I bought it because the back cover said that it was exploring the way Muslims saw Christianity in general and Jesus in particular and I thought that sounded like a good read – to have a look from someone else’s point of view.
Unfortunately all the book did was use the Koran to show how Christians incorrectly interpret the scriptures and how Christians had mistaken the role of Jesus and had deliberately changed the scriptures to suit themselves.
This seems particularly daft to me – to use one’s own scriptures to show how wrong everyone else is. And I don’t mean to pick on Muslims in this. I think Christians are just as useful at using scriptures to prove themselves right and others (often other Christians) wrong.
But doesn’t this somehow come down to a question of whose scriptures are the best, the newest; whose have precedence?
The Christians could claim precedence over the Jews because we have the newer revelation – it supersedes the old stuff the Jews were using. The problem is that Mohammed comes along and writes the Koran and his stuff is newer than ours, so it must be better. And then, in our own strands of faith we have both new scriptures (Joseph Smith and the Mormons, Conversations with God, A Course in Miracles) and “virtual new prophets” (Martin Luther etc). So now the Mormons have the best truth and Luther sent Christianity down his true path and changed the world we live in. I suspect that the biggest error is to want to make some, one “thing” to be The Truth.
What bugs me about the whole thing is that, apparently, we can only be right with God by making others wrong and that seems very much unlike how I imagine God.
I’ve been reading the fuss that Rob Bell’s book – “Love Wins” has created all over the place. Books have sprung up like weeds protecting the truth and condemning the falsehood. I have read book reviews where people of great faith have assured me that God really does want to condemn a whole bunch of people to be burned in eternity.
The weirdest thing about this to me is that I wouldn’t behave like that. I would be more forgiving, more generous. I could never condemn a child of mine to eternal damnation – I would always have a way back to my heart. And, if me, then surely God?
So, I guess I have two questions:
Is there any point in playing “My prophet is better than yours”?
Why don’t we just keep on writing scripture and recognising prophets?
In the story of the Prodigal Son the bedraggled boy turned towards home with a penitent heart. While he was still far off, the Father picked up the hem of his garment and started running towards him, embracing and welcoming the boy back into the heart of the family. There was no formula the boy had to recite, no penance he had to perform, no ritual of cleansing, no agent he had to work through, no sacrifice to be made (vicarious substitution) – when the boy’s heart longed to be back with the family, the Father sprinted towards him.
So why do we insist that God can only be approached in a certain way, through a specific path, via an agent? Couldn’t we just allow God to see us in the far distance as we turned our eyes back towards Him and allow him to gather us into his embrace?
Why so many rules?
And scripture.
The problem with closing it off is that we immediately accept that the Divine inspiration has ended; that it was completed at a time in the past. And what that does is to turn us towards what was, when we look for God, instead of looking for what is and what could yet be.
I’d love to be part of a people of faith looking out for the voice of God in music, the word of God in what we see around us, what we hear spoken and what we read and recognising the Divine in them
