Wrap-Up Questions

Here are some wrap-up questions that come to mind for me as we come to the close of the Animate: Bible series.

Jay Bakker makes the comment that understanding love and grace and viewing scripture through the lenses of Jesus and Paul allows him to just "move past" some of the difficult passages of scripture. Should we do that? Is it ok to just gloss over the difficult passages? How, then, do we respond to people, who don't have that understanding of grace and love, and want to discuss those difficult passages? Should we just tell them that it's a mystery? Is it impossible to understand without an experience with God? Should we try to understand those passages using our tools of interpretation and study?

We have talked a lot about relying on prayer and relationship with God to guide us in our interpretation to scripture. How should we respond to the mis-use of scripture in the church community? What do we do when the collective community uses scripture as a weapon? or a fortune cookie? or a fairy tale? What do we do when people, who seem very honest and sincere in their prayer and relationship with God also seem to be using scripture wrongly?

Maybe some of my questions are answered by Starr's question! Here is what Starr had to say:

One of my questions I'd like to think about is, Are we asking the right question when we say is this right or wrong in God's eyes.  I struggle with wanting to clearly define things at times .  Honestly, to not be so preoccupied about right and wrong could be very freeing in some ways .. But a difficult path to walk.

Please feel free to send more thoughts and questions in the comments or in email, and I will continue to add them to THIS post as late as 10pm tonight...

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I wanted to add some quotes from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, chapter 22, as I think they relate to the topic at hand. From the beginning of the chapter:

If this Chapter means nothing to you, if it seems to be trying to answer questions you never asked, drop it at once. Do not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road. These things are purely practical, though they do not look as if they were. They are directions for dealing with particular cross-roads and obstacles on the journey and they do not make sense until a man has reached those places. When ever you find any statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry. Leave it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what it meant. If one could understand it now, it would only do one harm.

And from the end of the chapter:

I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine.

 You can read the whole chapter here: http://readanybooks.net/fantasticfiction/Mere-Christianity/14792.html