Fighting with the Bible: Why Scripture Divides Us and How It Can Bring Us Together - Softcover

Morgan, Donn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596270586 ISBN 13: 9781596270589

Verlag: Seabury Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

In times of conflict, the Bible is often used as a club to beat those whose opinions differ from one's own. We recoil from such usage, yet the Bible actually represents many diverse and conflicting points of view. It is like a library, full of books that speak to all sides of every question.

Like Christians today, the communities and individuals who wrote the biblical texts often strongly disagree with each other. Ruth and Ezra, Isaiah and Ezekiel, Micah and Joel, Deuteronomy and Daniel, Mark and John. What would they say to each other? Do they have anything in common? Each of these voices is firmly committed to his or her specific view of "the truth," whether it reflects a particular place or community, a prophet, a style of worship, or an "understanding" of who is in and who is out.

The author guides us in considering how we can do justice to this welter of disparate voices. What can the Bible teach us about living together? How can we use it as a powerful resource for understanding and for moving beyond conflict?

A study guide and template for creating safe spaces for conversation about the tough issues in which the bible may be dividing your community is found at the end of the book.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donn Morgan recently retired as Dean & President of Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, CA. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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Fighting with the Bible

Why Scripture Divides Us and How It Can Bring Us Together

By Donn Morgan

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2007 Donn Morgan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59627-058-9

Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
1. A House or a Home?
2. A House of Division
3. A House of Difference
4. A House of Conversation
5. A Home for Diversity
6. A Home for Dialogue
7. A Home for Difference
Notes
Study Guide: Learning the Music of Biblical Dialogue
A Reading List

CHAPTER 1

A House or a Home?

Do you remember any of those animated films where, when the humans are gone forthe night and the house is quiet, the toys, the clocks, and other inanimateobjects come to life and start talking to one another, start exploring thehouse, happy that with human beings out of the way they can be in relationshipwith one another, with the whole house at their beck and call? The Bible is abit like this.

Imagine, if you will, a house containing all the communities that produced thebiblical books. Some of these communities were deeply involved in prayer (thewriters of the Psalms and Lamentations), in worship, and in meditation, bothindividually and with one another. Some of these communities lifted up greatstories with lots of interesting characters: David, Jesus, Jacob, Moses, Joseph,Ruth, Esther, and so many others abound in the pages of the Bible, and in thepreserved memories of these communities. Then there are the communities thatpreserve and lift up the sayings of those who have had prophetic roles—Jeremiah,Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, to name but a few. Sometimes we find these sayings in booksof oracles, or in collections of letters or prayers, or in the gospels. Whereverwe find them, most of the biblical communities refer to and are shaped by thefoundational stories of our faith, remembering Abraham or Jesus or Moses orDavid or Solomon or Peter, or others who speak of past revelation and presentcommitments.

Finally, after a long period of time, we have a complete book, a biblical house,filled with many different testimonies to the power and pertinence of God fortheir lives. The house as we see it now is nicely arranged and ordered, withsome communities of witness given the larger rooms, some medium-sized, and somevery small. Those arrangements change, moreover, as generations of caretakerscome and go and the outside world changes around them. Some generations want andneed prophetic vision and guidance; they are drawn to Jeremiah, to Isaiah, andto some of the sayings of Jesus. Others need the stability of communal valuesand visions found in legal materials and the stories of establishing the cultthey find in Exodus, Ezekiel, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and many of thePauline writings.

And now the house is quiet, and the biblical communities are alone. What willthey say to each other? Will they even recognize one another? What stories andvalues do they share? What distinctive contributions do they bring to living inthat biblical house together?

Now imagine again a similar house containing the communities of the church, withall of their differences and all of their shared commitments, similarly orderedand arranged—with those arrangements changing even more frequently, perhaps,than in the biblical house. Like the biblical house, there are many differencesof history, culture, concepts of God, geography, politics. Where can and does itend? What do these folks share? How will they understand the particularity anddifference within their communities, which both unite and divide?

In one sense we live today in both of these houses, and we need to create theopportunity to explore our own faith and our relationship with others withinthese premises. Dialogue will be essential. Asking questions of why and how thebiblical communities of the Psalms and Job and Paul are related to ourcommunities today, and how we will live together and have communion with oneanother—all of these are the stuff of dialogue in those houses.

Imagine now that these two houses are, or could be, one. Imagine that the manycommunities of the Bible have as much desire and need to speak to us as we do tothem. If we choose to listen to those communities, eventually, in ourconversation, in our earnest agreements and disagreements, in our puzzlement andpleasant surprises, we all just might begin to explore the question of who andwhat brought us all together. And whether the house is dark and we have it allto ourselves, or whether it is open to the whole world with all its hustle andbustle, we might just learn more from one another about God. In so doing, thehouse we have shared with seeming strangers becomes a home where realconversation can occur.

DIFFERENCE IN THE BIBLE: A SKETCH

Difference permeates the Bible. Not only do all the biblical communities andbooks of the Bible differ, different points of view occur, even in the samebook. Consider, for example, these three proverbs:

Those who are greedy for unjust gain make troublefor their households,but those who hate bribes will live. (Proverbs 15:27)

A bribe is like a magic stone in the eyesof those who give it;wherever they turn they prosper. (Proverbs 17:8)

The wicked accept a concealed bribeto pervert the ways of justice. (Proverbs 17:23)

Here it seems clear that the communities that produced these proverbs had somevery different (and contradictory) opinions about bribes. We can find similardifferences in legal collections, in the prayers of the psalmists, in thestories about Moses, David, and Jesus, and in the prophetic books. It seems thatthe biblical witness is anything but uniform, anything but homogenous.

There are many reasons for differences and contradictions in the Bible. Time andhistory are certainly two of these because the writings that make up the Biblewere composed in a period stretching well over a thousand years, conservativelyestimated from the end of the second millennium BCE to the beginning of thefirst millennium CE. In this time period many different cultures with both localand international power struggles play an important role in the world ofbiblical communities. The biblical writings were composed both inside andoutside Israel and at times when Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, andRomans were in control. This formative period also witnesses to the developmentand evolution of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages with both Semitic andIndo-European roots.

On the other hand, many of the reasons for difference in the Bible stem from theparticular characteristics of the small but distinctive land of Israel and thepeculiar experiences of the people who live there. So, for example, thetopography of Israel makes transportation difficult and forces one to followcertain well-worn routes to get from top to bottom or side to side of a verysmall territory. This encourages regionalization and smaller social structures,such as the ancient Israelite tribes—each one of them with their own independentand different traditions. Even when the larger social organizations of Israeland Judah develop, the different traditions of the original tribes often live onin law, liturgy, and story. (Think of the many stories of patriarchs and tribespreserved in Genesis and Judges.) Finally, the rough-hewn...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Seabury Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1596270586
• ISBN 13: 9781596270589
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland