Quotes About Bible

Over the years I've grown more and more convinced that "storytelling" is a better way of understanding what the Bible is doing with the past than "history writing.

Rulebook Bible reading" shortchanges the depth and raw reality of Israel's own journey of faith in God.

Protestant church tradition developed over several centuries when Christians were not yet forced, by virtue of the culminating evidence, to see the Bible in its ancient context.

I'VE BEEN ON A JOURNEY of rediscovering the Bible and the God behind it for over thirty years and I don't see that journey ending any time soon.

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job all agree: the Bible doesn't capture a freeze-frame of God and bind him to it. If we get on board with this idea, some other things the Bible says about God will make more sense.

These diverse stories of the past that we find in the Bible are not a problem to be solved. They model for us the spiritual immediacy of the present.

If, in full conversation with the biblical and extrabiblical evidence, we can adjust our expectations about how the Bible should behave, we can begin to move beyond the impasse of the liberal/conservative debates of the last several generations.

as Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible.

But this ungodlike God of the Bible gets at the very heart of both Jewish and Christian beliefs about God. This God doesn't keep his distance but embraces human experience

Without its unwavering commitment to adaptation over time, the Bible would have died a quick death over two thousand years ago. Its existence as a source of spiritual truth that transcends specific times and places is made possible by its flexibility and adaptive nature—one of the many paradoxes we need to embrace when it comes to the Bible.

That kind of Bible works, because that is our story, too. The Bible "partners" with us (so to speak), modeling for us our walk with God in discovering greater depth and maturity on our journey of faith, not by telling us what to do at each step, but by showing us a journey of hills and valleys, straight lanes and difficult curves, of new discoveries and insights, of movement and change—with God by our side every step of the way.

What I discovered, and what I want to pass along to you in this book, is that this view of the Bible does not come from the Bible but from an anxiety over protecting the Bible and so regulating the faith of those who read it.

The problem isn't the Bible. The problem is coming to the Bible with expectations it's not set up to bear.

I believe that God knows best what sort of sacred writing we need. And these three characteristic ways the Bible behaves, rather than posing problems to be overcome, are telling us something about how the Bible actually works and therefore what the Bible's true purpose is—and the need to align our expectations with it.

Rather than providing us with information to be downloaded, the Bible holds out for us an invitation to join an ancient, well-traveled, and sacred quest to know God, the world we live in, and our place in it. Not abstractly, but intimately and experientially.

In reading the Bible we are watching the spiritual journeys of people long ago.

When we are taught that the Bible has to meet these unrealistic expectations for our faith to be genuine, the end product is a fragile, nervous faith.

But if the Bible's main purpose is to form us, to grow us to maturity, to teach us the sacred responsibility of communing with the Spirit by walking the path of wisdom, it would leave plenty of room for pondering, debating, thinking, and the freedom to fail. And that is what it does.

Maybe the Bible isn't God's owner's manual for us that answers all our questions about God and lays a script out for us to follow as we walk along the Christian path.

And here's another important dimension of this book. When we accept that biblical invitation, we will see not only how the Bible challenges us to work out what it means to live the life of faith here and now. We will also see—if I may stress the point once again—how the biblical writers themselves were already challenged by the need to move past a rulebook mentality and respond to new circumstances with wisdom.

Wisdom, in other words, was not an add-on, but was always central for obeying any law in the Bible. Laws, once we begin thinking about what they mean and how they are to be obeyed, actually push us to seek wisdom, which goes beyond mechanical obedience. It's not surprising, therefore, that ancient Jews came to think of wisdom and Law as inseparable—they need each other to work, like needing a pin number to access your cash.

And here is the bigger point of all this: How the Bible addresses this one topic of child rearing is a window onto how inadequate (and truly unbiblical) a rulebook view of the Bible as a whole is.

We have every reason today to think differently about the universe and our place in it. This doesn't disprove God, but it does challenge our thinking. For people of faith, bringing the ancient Bible and our lives together can be stressful and unnerving—which is a problem if faith and correct thinking are deemed inseparable. "What does it mean to be human?" does not have as clear a biblical answer as it once had.

The idea of reimagining God as times and circumstances change should, therefore, not strike us as odd or the least bit troubling—our Bible is full of reimagining. Without it, there wouldn't be a "New" Testament or a Christian faith tradition. The entire history of the Christian church is defined by moments of reimagining God to speak here and now.