As a follow up from John Pavlovitz’s 5 Things I Wish Christians Would Admit about the Bible, I’ve included my own list of 7 Things I wish Christians knew.
The Bible is not a single book, but more of a complex library, written over some 1500 years, in the languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. There were real human processes behind its composition and canonisation which God used to give the Bible to us. First, the composition of many of these texts was a process rather than a single event. For instance, while Moses is recognized as the originator of the Pentateuch, it is very unlikely that he recorded his own death (Deuteronomy 34) and there are several references to what cities were called in the days of the patriarchs and how they are still called similarly “to this very day,” indicating a perspective from a later time (e.g., Gen 26.33; Deut 3.14-15). Similarly, the ending of the Gospel of John includes an affirmation of the Beloved Disciples’ testimony with the words “we know his testimony is true” (Jn 21.24) indicative of an epilogue added by those who edited the Beloved Disciples’ testimony. That some Old Testament texts were edited or updated by a prophet’s followers is something debated in relation to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, but there here is no prima facie case against this. To this end I rather like John Webster’s description of inspiration as including the “sanctification” of all human processes involved in the formation of Scripture. Second, on canonisation, if you didn’t notice, the Bible does not tell us which books should be in the Bible! So who decided that the Gospel of Matthew and Paul’s Letter to the Romans were to be included, while we the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter were left out? No, it wasn’t Constantine, but neither did a sherry of bishops in the secondary century go an Indiana Jones type of adventure with their inspiration-o-meter looking for Christian books to add to their growing collection authoritative texts. The basic criteria was books that contained the words of Jesus and the apostolic message about Jesus, and a consensus began to emerge by the late second century based upon the four Gospels, Acts, Paul’s thirteen letters plus Hebrews, 1 John, and 1 Peter, with the other books in our NT eventually finding consensus, but over a much longer period. To be sure, the Church did not invent the Bible, the Church itself is a creation of the Word of God, but the Church was tasked with putting the divine word into its canonical location.
The Bible is for us, but not about us. This can create problems when we assume that the Bible professes the perspectives of our age or intends to speak directly to our context. If we assume that the Bible supports Marxist economics or laissez faire capitalism, the right to carry arms or non-nuclear proliferation, gender fluidity or home schooling, then we are either reading stuff into the Bible (which is bad) or maybe trying to reason from the Bible (which is okay), but either way we are not taking stuff directly from the Bible. The Bible was written for its own world and not directly to ours. That does not mean that it cannot address our own context and concerns, of course it does, but we have to remember that our reading of the Bible is mediated by 2000 years of history, and shaped by our own language, culture, history, and identity. Being a 30 year old, white, middle-class, female, Pentecostal, living in New Zealand will inevitably shape the way you read the Bible and you should not assume the normativity of your own reading experience. We must acknowledge the socio-cultural distance between the biblical world and our world and that our reading of the Bible is partly a product of our own environment. That will teach us that we cannot just jump from ancient text to modern time without first engaging the chasm that exists between the two. Therefore, a good interpreter will need a basic grasp of the biblical world, pay attention to the history of interpretation, cultivate global conversation partners, and be self-critical of what we assume about the Bible.
Debates about taking the Bible literally or metaphorically are often missing the point. For instance, Genesis 1 is not a moment by moment commentary on how God made the world, nor narrating the story in such a way that the main purpose is to refute Darwinism. Genesis 1 is primarily about worldview, adopting a God-centred view of reality, affirming that however the world was made that it owes its existence to God, and admiring the artistry of God as seen in splendor of creation. This does not mean that Genesis 1 is merely “myth” in the sense of fairy tales, but it sets forth in a literary masterpiece the truth that God is the Creator and there is no Other. This is a competing narrative to other ancient near eastern accounts about creation and in practice it means that you don’t worship the stars, you worship the God who made the stars. In many places in the Bible the main point is not literal but literary, and reading the Bible in light of its genres and context is the best way to take it seriously.
Protestants believe in the clarity of Scripture. However, even Protestant confessions like the Westminster Confession and London Baptist Confession state that the clarity of Scripture only applies to the things “necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation.” Everything else is not necessarily “plain in themselves” nor “clear unto all” (WCF 1.7/LBC 1.7). In other words, the Bible is clear about the gospel, how to get right with God, but after that it can get a bit sticky. So we need teachers, we need metaphorical Phillip’s to run beside us in our chariot and to explain the Scripture to us. First, we should always be prepared to consult tradition. Now tradition often gets a bad name, but tradition is simply what the church has learned from reading Scripture. I like to say that tradition is a tool for reading Scripture, a tool we be wise to use. We engage are recklessness if we venerate tradition as infallible and yet we are foolish if we ignore what tradition has to teach us. Second, we need to look to those who inhabit the offices of pastors and teachers, and listen to them in their learning of Scripture, languages, doctrine, and history. While you may think that your soul has the competence and liberty to interpret the Bible as the Spirit leads you, as a professional scholar let me tell you something, some souls are more competent than others, and listening to some teachers will give the Holy Spirit more to work with in guiding you into the truth!
God is a revealing God. God makes himself known through creation, through history, in the words of the prophets, through the preaching of the gospel, most definitively in the incarnation of the Jesus the Logos, and also by the inspiration of human authors to write books that convey divine message in the medium of human language. The purpose of revelation is that we might know God and know him as our Saviour. The purpose of that knowledge is to create faith in the sense of assent and trust towards God, but more properly to give us an assurance that God is for us and with us, in other words, hope. This is what St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans: “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope” (Rom 15.4). Scripture, then, should not be reduced to a list of rules, nor a box full of ancient stories, nor even a map for the future. God speaks to us in Scripture so that we would know the God of Creation and Redemption, and by knowing God, we would have hope amidst the trials of human life.
Theological debates within both evangelicalism and conservative Catholicism have focused not so much on if the Bible is true, but how the Bible is true. The challenge has been how best to articulate Scripture’s truthfulness amidst on-going conversations about science and religion, biblical criticism and pre-modern interpretation, postmodern reading strategies, and the role of the Bible in the public square. Among conservative groups one’s stance on this subject is often treated as a life and death matter and resultantly terms like “inerrancy” or “infallibility” become tribal colors which identify a person in relation to particular perspectives and postures related to the Bible. However, I want to suggest that conservative shibboleths are not or should not be the primary marker for what constitutes an “orthodox” or “high” view of Scripture. The main point of contention between the orthodox and progressives is not over nomenclature (inerrancy vs. infallibility) or even symbolic theologians (Ratzinger vs. Rahner), but over the more fundamental question as to whether or not Scripture is normative or negotiable. Is Scripture a word from God to be heeded and obeyed even if it means going against culture (normative) or is Scripture a human word about God to be selectively utilized insofar as it enables us to speak a transcendent word to our native context (negotiable)?
The Bible is the enduring Word of God. But it is not the foundation of our faith. Rather, Jesus is the foundation of our faith, as St. Paul says: “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11). Because of that foundation, we should build up from it by reading the Bible as a Christ-centered book that finds its highest testimony and interpretive center in him. In fact, this is precisely how the early church interpreted Israel’s Scriptures. Just look at how they read and preached about Psalm 2, 16, 110, and 118, or even Isaiah 53, or Deuteronomy 32. These texts, in their various ways, are about Jesus. This is something that Jesus himself taught to the two strangers on the road to Emmaus: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). If you want to understand the Bible you need to understand Jesus. And if you want to understand Jesus you need to understand the Bible.
IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.
Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”
Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.
Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.
For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.
What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.
But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.
We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.
Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.
Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.
We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.
We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.
This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.
The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.
Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.
Photo: Getty Images
Bedtime is one of the most important parts of the day for the brain. The latest studies show that when we slumber, the brain performs important housekeeping tasks that clear away the debris of the day’s work and help reset and restore nerve networks so they are ready to operate again at full capacity when we wake.
But a lack of sleep deprives the brain of this essential rest period, and our ability to get through the day might be compromised. In a small study published in the journal Radiology, a team of Chinese and European researchers report a more detailed analysis of how insomnia can affect specific types of brain nerves in parts of the brain that regulate cognition, emotion and sensory processes.
The researchers compared the brain images of 23 people with insomnia and 30 healthy controls. They specifically focused on white matter volume, which represents nerve cells that are coated in a special protein called myelin that improves their ability to send signals to one another. Earlier brain imaging studies had suggested that people with insomnia have differences in certain parts of the brain that could be connected to inadequate myelin. So Shumei Li from the Guangdong No. 2 Provincial People’s Hospital and her colleagues compared white matter function among people with insomnia and those who slept well.
RELATED: Why Interrupted Sleep Is Worse Than Short Sleep
They found that people with insomnia—defined as trouble sleeping for over a month that’s associated with daytime sleepiness and sleep disturbances—had significantly less white matter connectivity, especially between areas that control sleep and wakefulness, than those without insomnia. Li speculates that this disruption in signals between these regions was triggered by thinning of the myelin surrounding the neurons, which resulted in less chatter among them.
In fact, 83%, or five of the six major nerve tracts that the scientists analyzed, were reduced among people with insomnia. Most were concentrated in the right part of the brain, where emotions and many thinking functions are regulated, as well as where sensory information like sight, smell and touch are processed.
Li says that more studies are needed to explain what might be causing the brain differences in people with insomnia, but the results hint at a starting point.
Volunteer in a NICU
If you want to comfort sick babies, you can volunteer in a local neonatal intensive care unit.
These newborns need love and comfort just as much as they need treatment from doctors, but sometimes parents are unable stay in the hospital and give their newborns constant affection.
That’s when volunteers are needed. They hold and rock the NICU babies when their parents are unavailable.
Be a respite parent or host family
Sometimes children need a temporary home. This can involve both babies and older kids.
Giving Children a Chance of Georgia's Respite Parent Program gives you the chance to watch over children when their foster family feels the need to take a day, weekend, or week off for vacation or an emergency.
Bethany Christian Services’ Safe Families Program is more long term. Parents voluntarily place their children with host families while dealing with a crisis or trying to resolve an issue.
The average stay is six weeks.
Volunteer at a foster parents day off event
Throughout the year, GCAC of Georgia holds several days of planned activities for foster children. GCAC staff members watch over the kids, and foster parents get a day off. Extra volunteers are needed to help out with a variety of tasks on these days, including taking care of foster babies. Find out more on GCAC of Georgia’s website.
But don't expect to just walk in and be handed a child. For most of these programs, you'll have to undergo a background check and interview, and meet other requirements.
