A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [40]
But beyond that, biblical writers never understood themselves to be writing a constitution that would be read by people hundreds or thousands of years in the future and thousands of miles away. No, they were writing for their own times, to address specific problems and questions of their day. And beyond that, when all of the Old Testament writers produced the works that now appear in the Bible, there was no Bible! Jesus himself wrote nothing (on paper, that is; according to a disputed passage in John 8, he did write in the dust one day with his finger—an evocative action, by the way, that may have had more symbolic significance than first meets the eye).4 The gospels that tell his life were written decades later, and the whole collection of ancient documents that comprise the Christian Bible today were only gathered in their current form centuries after that.
So, whatever the Bible is, it simply is not a constitution. I would like to propose that it is something far more interesting and important: it’s the library of a culture and community—the culture and community of people who trace their history back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Think, for example, of a public library today. People sort through all the possible books that could be included and select some hundreds or thousands to make available to the local public. A medical library selects books of special interest to people who belong to the medical profession; a Shakespeare library selects books of interest to members of the literary guild; a presidential library, to historians of a particular president. The biblical library, similarly, is a carefully selected group of ancient documents of paramount importance for people who want to understand and belong to the community of people who seek God and, in particular, the God of Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, and Jesus.
But here’s the problem: the expectations we bring to a constitution and a library couldn’t be more different. For starters, a constitution is neat, and we assume it has internal consistency. But a culture is messy and full of internal tension, and those characteristics would be reflected in a good library. In fact, some have defined a culture as a group of people who argue about the same things over many generations (as, we have seen, top-down deductive Platonists and bottom-up inductive Aristotelians have done in Greco-Roman history). That may sound like a depressingly contentious definition, but in fact, though, a culture’s arguments signal a deeper unity: a culture thinks certain questions are so important that it keeps struggling with them over many generations.5
For example, in my country, we’ve been united by a set of perennial political and economic arguments: What are the rights of the nation in relation to the rights of the state and the individual? What are the rights of the majority in relation to the rights of minorities? Is the nation the fundamental reality, and we are all human embodiments or expressions of the nation, or is the individual the fundamental reality, and the nation is primarily a service agency to uphold individual rights? Are the poor more dependent on the well-being of the rich, or the rich more dependent on the well-being of the poor? When we get lazy or squelch dissent and stop debating these issues, we seem to get in trouble; when we keep the arguments alive, we seem to stay healthier.
Other cultures have been united by different arguments about different questions. For example, some cultures have argued for generations about the relative rights of the dead and the living. Are the living obligated to submit to the wisdom (or folly) of their ancestors? In the future, cultures may argue more (I hope) about the rights of the living versus the not-yet-living: what obligations do we today have to our unborn descendants seven or one hundred generations into the future?
A culture, then, is a group of people who say different things about the same things. They propose a variety of answers to the same basic questions. To be part of the culture means that you agree that