Scripture & Action

I always love the chance to show how relevant the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is to modern day Christians.

When I was in college I started learning an incredible amount about the Bible and how we are supposed to be interpreting the Bible. I learned about commentaries and context, Greek and Hebrew (the languages the Bible was originally written in). And because of all my learning I started looking down on people who didn't have the same knowledge and I started making it my life goal to make sure everyone knew that they needed the knowledge that I had. Somehow I had bought into the idea that knowing more about the Bible makes you a better Christian.

When I started graduate school a few years ago I realized that such is not the case. The poor peasant Christian in Thailand who only owns one torn out piece of Scripture, say Matthew 22 ("Love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul, and with all your mind. And the second is like it - Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and Prophets hang on these two commandments") but actually lives this verse everyday, has come closer to the heart of what Christianity is all about than I was after all of my training.

Enter Kierkegaard:

"In other words, it is not the obscure passages in Scripture that bind you but the ones you understand. With these you are to comply at once. If you understood only one passage in all of Scripture, well, then you must do that first of all...God's Word is given in order that you shall act according to it, not that you gain expertise in interpreting it...Being alone with God's Word is a dangerous matter. Of course, you can always find ways to defend yourself against it: Take the Bible, lock your door - but then get out ten dictionaries and twenty-five commentaries. Then you can read it just as calmly and coolly as you read newspaper advertising.

With this arsenal you can really begin to wonder, "Are there not several valid interpretations? So you calmly conclude, "I myself am not absolutely sure about the meaning of this passage. I need more time to form an opinion." Good Lord! What a tragic misuse of scholarship that it makes it so easy for people to deceive themselves!

Can't we be honest for once! We have become such experts at cunningly shoving one layer after another, one interpretation after another, between the Word and our lives...and we then allow this preoccupation to swell to such profundity that we never come to look at ourselves in the mirror...

It is only all too easy to understand the requirements contained in God's Word ("Give all your good to the poor" etc.) The most ignorant, poor creature cannot honestly deny being able to understand God's requirements. But it is tough on the flesh to will to understand it and to then act accordingly.

Herein lies the problem. It is not a question of interpretation, but action."

From For Self-Examination & Judge For Yourself, 26-35

Sarcasm & Myth

As I was reading Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments today (as anyone is prone to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon) I ran into a small sarcastic quip that I thought again shows Kierkegaard extremely relevant for today. It is his introduction into one of his parables to explain how "the god" lisps to his loved one in order to have a reciprocal love:

"Suppose there was a king who loved a maiden of lowly station in life - but the reader may already have lost patience when he hears that our analogy begins like a fairy talk and is not at all systematic."

It seems that the problems we have today with systematic theologians has a long history (with Philosophical Fragments written in the first half of the 19th century).

Even then history was often considered more "truthful" than parable (or dun...dun...dun..."myth") and that "husking" the narratives of Scripture to get at the "kernels" is what is really important.

What a mean and petty God we serve who gave us a book that is mostly narrative and only partly propositional so that we have to spend all of our time finding out how to reduce the narratives to propositions...Wait a minute...