From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Subject: Re: Alignment of will, asking for help!
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 92 03:40:14 GMT

sbuckley@fraser.sfu.ca (Stephen Buckley) writes:

> when my friend
> wanted to not be a christian, it was easy to disregard the bible.  now that
> he is, it is even easier to see it relevant in his life, thus useful and not
> something to abandon simply because of historical imperfection, etc.

Christianity is not the Bible. Christians don't generally worship the Bible.
Only Catholics (among Christians) worship traditions (this may be an
over-generalization but is generally true).

Christians worship God, and Christ. (well, again, you will find exceptions).

But the point here is that to get to know God, the Bible and the traditions,
for a Jew or a Christian, are just - well - aids, so to speak. They do not
'contain' the truth and I think very few Jews or Christians look on
Scripture or Tradition as infallible. Rather they contain expressions of how
various people at various times have spoken about the truth, and thus like
pointers. They can lead you to God, but they are not God. A tool doesn't
need to be perfect to be very usable.

The knowledge of God is something worked out in one's own life between a
person and God. God *calls*, and a person may respond or not respond. The
Bible may or may not help. There were a lot of Christians before there ever
was a Bible, and a lot of Jews before there ever was a Torah. 

A great deal of Scripture and Tradition simply is folk-history - it tells us
where we have been. Another big part of it is moral teaching. To be useful,
moral teaching doesn't have to be 'historically accurate', it just has to be
'true'. Truth and historical accuracy are not the same thing. Another part
of Scripture is really a kind of mythology - it speaks of meaning and its
importance lies in what certain things *meant* to the authors, much more
than the quality of the historiography.

The Scriptures are *not* scientific documents. They are not about material
reality. Nobody recorded the temperature or the humidex the day that Jesus
was crucified. That was *not* the important part. Nor is it all that
important just *what* was said by whom to whom. We don't know. 50 to 70
years later, when it was written down, nobody could be exactly sure anyway.
But what they *were very sure of* was what it meant to them. And that is
what they wrote about. 

To read the gospels is to read what Jesus meant to Christians many decades
after the events. It is not to read a contemporary biography. Understood
that way, the 'imperfections' just add to the spice of the recipe and make
it more interesting.

The Bible is a 'perfect bible', and is exactly what a Bible should be. It is
not a perfect history nor a perfect biography, and is not what a history or
a biography should be. If you accept it for what it is, it will speak to you
powerfully. If you compalain that it is not what you would like, then you
won't like it.

As with most things in life, you have to first recognize and accept just
what you are dealing with before you can understand it. As long as you are
lamenting that it is not what you want, of course you will be unsatisfied
with *anything* that does't meet your prescription.

=Doug

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