Grand stories.

The Bible often faces criticism for being a contradictory collection of texts that are not accurate when it comes to history and natural science. Not only is those claims mostly false, but I think that critics who approach the Bible in that manner has often completely missed something about the nature of the Bible in the lives of Christians.

I have five volumes of the Bible in three different languages in my bookshelves, and I can tell you that they are as silent as the grave. They're not saying anything to me if I don't apply myself to reading the texts. The reading of anything is an interpretive act. The texts have meaning only if I read them, and as I read them I will interpret them. I am condition by my culture and by my experiences, so will I undeniably understand them in a different way than anyone else. A 40-year-old woman who has lost her child will have a different take on the story of the death of King David's son Absalom than a 16-year-old boy. 

The life of faith is messy and complicated, and I think that you will never understand us if you keep demanding that we should be simple and clear-cut. As if life ever was simple and clear-cut.

My God is not the God of the Gaps, but the God of Life. And if you ask for the Bible to be a font of scientific fact, or Christianity to be some neat and tidy philosophy that can be generalised, then you will face constant dissapointment. Christianity exists only as a way of life, and the biblical stories are illustrations of human life, of love and hate, of suffering and horror, of mercy and forgiveness, of loyalty, of faith, and of a loving but sometimes frightening God that is present in all that, who loves his creation and will never abandon it. The stories have meaning as our own life experiences engages in the biblical stories. That's what we Christians do, when we re-tell to eachothers these sometimes wonderful and affirming, and at other times alarming and challenging stories. The Bible can only be understood in the context of worship.

We Christians are not biblical archeologists that are trying to mine the text for a simple answer (an answer to what exactly?). But we are pilgrims who have experienced something of a divine wisdom in the person of Jesus Christ, for God did not reveal himself in a collection of texts, but in a person. And so, in the many different stories of the Bible, something in our own life's story becomes illuminated. Be relating our personal story to the grand story of the people of Israel, and of the disciples of Jesus, we gain a point of view of who we are, and who this strange and merciful God is. Reading the Bible is not a one-way street of information flow, but rather a meeting between my own story and the grand story.