Saturday, April 21, 2007

My Hope for Story

The greatest mistake in religion in the modern era has been to confuse “the word of God” with human words or textual words in a book. If “the word was in the beginning,” then clearly the WORD is bigger than human words or textual words. It preceded all words by about 14 billion years!

The creation-centered mystic Meister Eckhart said in the 14th century that “every creature is a word of God and a book about God.” This carries us for beyond the overly anthropocentric idea that the Bible alone as the “word of God,” a modern notion that emerged because of our fascination with texts at the invention of the printing press.

Matthew Fox

I remember a time when theology was easy. The Bible was the word of God and it was the only divine source. If you had a question about life, morality, or the future the Bible could answer your question with absolute certainty. That’s not how I see the Bible anymore.

As I journeyed into a new paradigm, the Bible took on a whole new life with endless possibility. Rather then needing the Bible to be inerrant in order to be completely understood, this book became a lovely story. Story doesn’t have to be 100% accurate to be effective in transforming us. Story captivates us and as we get wrapped up in narrative, we learn to see each other and the world in new and better ways. At one point, the story means one thing to us then we read it again and it changes. Story cannot be held down to mean one thing. It lives and breathes.

When we see Bible as story that means we add pages to it as we live. I believe that we (all of Mankind) are the people of God. We need to see what is happening in our lives as relevant to theology as the Bible itself. In a way, you might say that our time is the newest testament.

One of the stories contained in the Bible tells the reader about the amazing capacity of humankind to make God into something He is not. The story starts with Abraham; God becomes the God of covenant; then to Egypt, and God becomes known for exodus; from there to Moses and God is explained as Law; on to the kings where God is known as Ruler; jumping from there to Jesus-God is known as Emanuel. Might one point of this story be that God is constantly breaking out of the molds that He is put in, but not the only point?

Oh that we might be open to story.

P.S. Matthew Fox is an Episcopal Priest, not the star of Lost.

1 comment:

tabitha jane said...

i don't really have much to say . . . i just wanted to let you know that i read what you wrote and that it is a topic that has been on my mind as well . . . i hope to figure it out sometime . . . grace and peace to you.