Experiencing The Truth In The Bible

When I first learned to sing "Jesus Loves Me," in a circle on the floor of my first grade Sunday School room, it was over the distractions of being poked, prodded, and tickled by buddies on both sides. They received my retaliatory gestures in the same impish spirit with which I delivered them, and somehow we all managed to keep our dis-graceful behaviors out of the view of a struggling teacher who deserved better from us. I think I have become a better person than the snotty kid I was then, but I still have trouble getting into that song. Believing things about Jesus simply because "the Bible tells me so" cuts as little ice with me now as it did then.

In fairness, I should confess that seminary almost cured me of my oppositional/defiant disorder in matters scriptural. In those days, the very strangeness of the Bible was what was supposed to capture our attention and imagination, and drive us to our knees in repentance over a too casual acceptance of modernity. If I hadn't had to deal with lots of Fundamentalists in my summer jobs as a youth minister, I might have bought the whole neo-orthodox program, lock, stock, and canon. But their idea of Jesus' love, like the idea I had been toying with in seminary, was just that: an idea more than an experience, and an idea pushed because a Book told us to.

During one of those summers, another sweetly pious song began getting to me in ways I never would have expected. Remember the one about walking and talking with Jesus in the garden, alone? And its grandiose closing words, to the effect that Jesus and the singer have something going between them that "none other has ever known"? If you want to know the truth, this is a really awful song. Dew still on the roses, the Master's voice so sweet that the birds stopped singing? As my church kids were fond of saying, gag me with a spoon. And yet, the song's closing tone is just right, with a voice of "woe" urging us out of the garden and into a suffering world. Its theology transcends its imagery. We know that Jesus loves us not just because the Bible tells us so; we know it because he tells us so. How he does it is a great mystery; that he does it is not.

The Bible is a stand alone source and norm for faith only for people unwilling to acknowledge the crucial difference between its many human words and the Word of God that struggles to break through them. Going for the Bible like Wyatt Earp went for his gun is a tactic only for people unwilling to acknowledge that its words deserve the attention they do because they speak from and to the depths human experience understandingly and compassionately. From the standpoint of having to experience its truth for ourselves in the midst of ever-changing circumstances, values, and hopes, the Bible is less a test for orthodoxy and more an invitation to fellowship. It is less about rapping things up in our heads than it is about warming things up in our hearts, less about securing peoples' loyalty and more about serving their needs. For the third millennium, it must be much less about conquest, and much more about reconciliation.

A lot of faithful people continue to find a perspective like this one discomforting, no matter what their own sacred scriptures may be. As the world-renowned religious historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith kept reminding us, there are fundamentalists everywhere nowadays, and (in my words) they are all working overtime to insulate what they believe to be timeless truths from the vicissitudes of new experiences, questions, and expectations. They seem especially put off by the very notion that has otherwise made so much sense in the Christian community ever since the time of the Apostle Paul: their treasures, too, have to be kept in earthen vessels.

Maybe not in as many vessels as there are individuals on the planet; the idea of Jesus having to take a walk with each and every one of us in order to get God's message across is just a little too weird even for me. Communities as well as individuals generate experiences --- of desire and fulfillment, fear and hope, sadness and joy --- and I for one cherish his presence in the midst of fellow believers as much as in my alone times. But however he shows up, it is in the showing up that what the Bible tries to say about him, not always successfully, gains its truthfulness.