The Burdens of The Giver

One of my favorite books to read is The Giver by Lois Lowry. Not to get all reader-response or anything but I love it because it means something specifically to me and reminds me of my role as a pastor/theologian. Let me explain:

In The Giver the protagonist is a young boy named Jonas who lives in a utopian society where there are no skinned knees and there is no experience of pain. In this society the time came, at the age of 12, when children became adults and were given what was to be there destiny, their place in the community, the role they were to perform for the good of the community. There were all kinds of jobs but only every great once in a while was there a replacement chosen for the most revered role of all, the role of the Giver. This lot befell Jonas.

The Giver was responsible for bearing all of the painful experiences and painful memories of the community so that the community didn't have to (Christ figure?). At the end of the day, Jonas decides that the joys that come with pain are worth the pain and so he releases the pain back into the community.

So where do I see the pastor/theologian? S/he is the Giver in the community. The weight of theological and biblical "pains" must be borne by them, they are the gatekeepers of the faith. Not everyone who claims Christ needs to master or even be aware of the myriad questions and theological problems the pastor/theologian is constantly confronted with. But the questions and problems must be dealt with by someone. 

With this position is the utmost responsibility - deciding in what scenarios and relationships it is best for the community to be exposed to a little "pain." Do you keep bearing all of the burden to shield those in your care? Or do you let them in on a little of your experience? But when will it do good instead of doing harm? This is increasingly the role I find myself in as a pastor and as a student of the Scriptures. 

As I tell most people who aspire to know more about the Bible...be very careful that you don't have false expectations about what this knowledge will bring. This knowledge is not primarily a gift but a burden. If we are interested in having our egos boosted by our knowledge then pick another field because the ethical weight of Scriptural knowledge can be a weight under which our pride and self-sufficiency are crushed.

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

Barthian Ruminations

As our Schleiermacher Reading Group at WTS is currently reading through Barth's Church Dogmatics section on Scripture, I have found myself having tremendous sympathies with his views on Scripture. Now, this is pretty scary and uncharted territory for me since I have it ingrained in me to consider Barth a hermeneutical and Christological heretic even though he opposed the theological liberals of his time (who I was also taught to consider heretical).

But I think that just as many of my fears about critical scholarship were unfounded so were my fears about Barth. For instance, he states:

"The demand that the Bible should be read and understood and expounded historically is, therefore, obviously justified and can never be taken too seriously. The Bible itself posits this demand: even where it appeals expressly to divine commissionings and promptings, in its actual compostion it is eerywhere a human word, and this human word is obviously intended to be taken seriously and read and understood and expounded as such. To do anything else would be to miss the reality of the Bible and therefore the Bible itself as the witness of revelation. The demand for a "historical" understnading of the Bible necessarily means, in content, that we have to take it for what it undoubtedly is and is meant to be: the human speech uttered by specific men at speciic times in a specific situation, in a specific language and with a specific intention. It emans that the understanding of it has honestly and unreservedly been on which is guided by all these considerations...To the extent that it [the concrete humanity of Scripture] is ignored, it has not been read at all."

What I love about this quotation is that it gets at the heart of what makes the Bible so uncomfortable for both theological conservatives and theological liberals: its historical situatedness. For theological liberals history is unimportant because it cannot be trusted to be accurate, so we tear off the husk of situatedness and grasp the kernel of moral truth behind the history.

For theological conservatives history is too concrete and not "transcendent" or "ontological" enough, so we tear off the husk of situatedness and grasp the kernel of "what the divine author really meant." We often read the text as though we want to always be getting behind the history rather than seeing the revelation itself as historical. I am not sure as to the implications of this but I do know that it gels much better with what we actually find in Scripture, that it was written by specific individuals, for specific individuals, for specific circumstances. We should probably then be spending our time figuring out how this fact affects our hermeneutic rather than expending all of our energy brushing this fact under the proverbial rug.