Brian McLaren suggests that reading the Bible like a ‘written constitution’ has led the church into supporting some clearly wrong actions such as slavery. A different way of approaching the Bible is to see it as an ‘inspired library’. ‘This inspired library’ says McLaren, ‘preserves, presents and inspires an on-going vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed’.

God-inspired nonsense?
In order to illustrate his point McLaren has a chapter on the Book of Job. As we know, Job has three distinct sections – first comes the scene where Satan persuades God that Job would renounce his faith in difficult circumstances; then there is a lengthy section where some of Job’s friends come to comfort him and suggest he must have done something wrong to deserve such treatment; and finally there is a shorter section where God comes to Job in a series of profound questions. In this last section God says that a lot of what Job’s friends had been saying is foolish – which begs the question, why did God inspire a lengthy section of Scripture that is nonsense? If every part of the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God, then what do we do with a section that God says is foolishness?

God revealed in a story
This would be a problem if we treated the Bible as a constitution, but not so if we have a different approach. McLaren says that revelation happens in the ‘conversations and arguments that take place’ within the text and within the community of faith that discusses the text. God is revealed in the story and the interactions between the story’s characters and not simply in any single statement found within the text. Of course, this approach does not easily supply us with set answers to life’s difficult questions but, he asks, ‘Could it be that God’s Word intends not to give us easy answers and short cuts to confidence and authority but rather … to render us, again and again, into a posture of wonder, humility, rebuke and smallness in the face of the unknown?’

It is an approach that does not put us under the text as some conservatives would have us, or above the text as some liberals would have, but in the text and thereby helping us meet God face to face.


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