It had to happen sooner or later

Clumber will now shut up for Holy Week. Bless you all.

There, that’s better

Happy St. Patrick’s Day:

Inconceivable!

(sorry, this is a long, multi-quoted note… you have Clumber’s permission to skip it and go back to sleep…. after all, that’s what I’m going to do)

For those of you who have followed along for a while, you know that one of my favorite movies is “Princess Bride”, and if you know the movie, you know the next line:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.

Today’s canine rumination is on a little bit of prooftexting that I first spotted in the blog of one of Central New York’s own, Tony Seel, who now lives and works in the African town of Vestal. Btw, is his the least commented on blog in the webiverse? In any case, it turns out that all he’s done anyway is cut and paste from Mr Virtue. Here’s the quote they throw out at us:

Authority and relevance. The modern world detests authority but worships relevance. So to bracket these two words in relation to the Bible is to claim for it one quality (authority) which people fear it has but wish it had not, and another (relevance) which they fear it has not but wish it had. Our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance - to a degree quite extraordinary in so ancient a book - and that the secret of both is in Jesus Christ. Indeed, we should never think of Christ and the Bible apart. ‘The Scriptures … bear witness to me,’ he said (Jn. 5:39), and in so saying also bore his witness to them. This reciprocal testimony between the living Word and the written Word is the clue to our Christian understanding of the Bible. For his testimony to it assures us of its authority, and its testimony to him of its relevance. The authority and the relevance are his. — From “The Authority and Relevance of the Bible in the Modern World” (Canberra: The Bible Society in Australia)

Well, I couldn’t find the original online (not that I spent a long time looking) but here is a later article based on the original.. It’s called Culture and the Bible. And you all know, I’m better with a photochop than I am with theology, but to a lay-dog like me, it’s a pretty good read. However, as you might guess, the above quote does not do it justice. And since Mr Virtue prooftexts it, so shall I (hey, he started this, don’t blame me!).

To say “the Bible is the Word of God” is true, but it is only a half-truth,
even a dangerous half-truth. For the Bible is also a human word and witness.

the four lives of Jesus are not biographies but
gospels written by evangelists, who were bearing witness to
Jesus. Consequently, they selected and arranged their material
according to their theological purpose. Moreover, their purpose
arose naturally-though also in God’s providence-from their
temperament, their background and their God-given
responsibilities to the people of God.

The New Hermeneutic. In addition, however, during the last ten to fifteen
years scholars have been talking about a new hermaneutic. This goes
beyond general principles to the particularities of both the writers and
the readers of the Bible. Its most notable feature is the importance
which it attaches to the constantly changing human cultures.
God chose to speak to and through people of particular cultures

Take the biblical cultures first. No word of the Bible was spoken
in a cultural vacuum. Every part of it was culturally conditioned.
This is not to say that its message was controlled by the local
culture in such a way as to be distorted by it, but rather that the
local culture was the medium through which God expressed himself.

For example, Jesus commanded us to wash one another’s feet. We should
not discard this instruction on the ground that foot-washing is no part
of the contemporary culture of the West. Nor should we ignore the
cultural factor and with wooden unimaginative literalism go round
asking people to take their shoes and socks off in order to let us
wash their feet. No, the right response is to discern the inner reality
of our Lord’s command, which is that if we love one another we will
serve one another, even by doing dirty and menial jobs for one another.
Then, if we do not wash each other’s feet, we will gladly
clean each other’s shoes. The purpose of such cultural transposition,
it will be seen, is not to dodge the awkward commands of Jesus,
but rather to make our obedience contemporary.

There is an urgent need today for creative Christian thinkers who will be
utterly loyal to the essentials of the biblical gospel, but who will express
it in fresh ways appropriate to every culture. To this task the Incarnation
commits us. In order to communicate with us, the Eternal Word became
flesh. He entered our world and lived our life. We, too, if we are to reach
others who are alienated from God and from the gospel, will have to
enter their cultural worlds, in particular their thought worlds. Only so
can we hope to share the good news with them in terms which they
can grasp.

And in the end, it seems to be taking a sort of conservative/evangelical/liberal view that we need to take the Bible seriously, but not necessarily literally. But then, maybe that’s just a long-eared spaniel’s view of the article. In any case, 16 pages isn’t a lot to read now, is it? Somebody smart tell me what I’ve missed there…