AJ Swoboda, The Low-Level Theologian, starts his essay about Scripture and mystery, paradox, and seeming contradiction with an anecdote about GK Chesterton, appropriately enough. The Mystery That Makes Us, reminds us that we are not to come to the scriptures in any arrogance, demanding immediate clarity, but in humility, trusting that God has spoken to us in the best way possible, and it is up to us to adapt if we do not understand.
To genuinely engage with the story of the Bible, it is critical that we learn to work backwards from what seems reasonable. Too often, we are prone to believe that the biblical text is credible only if we have come to understand or agree with it. What we have to learn to do is come at it differently. We must come assuming it is true. We must first accept it as it is—as truth and reality—and then work backwards from there. Reading Scripture correctly requires us to reverse-engineer our understanding of reality to what is revealed in Scripture. We don’t start by assuming our experience of reality is true and that the Bible must fit into that; rather, we begin with the assumption that everything in Scripture is true and trustworthy, and we learn to adjust our view of the world around it.
There are twinned errors which complicate this. One is to remain literalist and insist the earth must be square because the Bible says it has four corners. The other is to make everything Bible so metaphorical, believing that to be spiritual, that it no longer has any definite meaning. The Swedenborgs and many New Age Christians are sometimes lovely people, but a faith that relies entirely on mysticism can quickly go awry.
2 comments:
I wonder if gnostic mysticism and strict literalism don't take one to the same place in the end. That place looks to me like a dreamworld, but I understand that "reality" looks like a dreamworld to mystics and literalists. This writer also leaves me with the question, true about what?
Reminds me of this Chesterton quote:
Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself.
We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful moment we remember that we forget.
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