A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [43]
But for all its difficulty, I anticipate that our quest for a new approach to the Bible will become more attractive the more we practice it. As we transcend the wrangle and tangle of theolegal suits and countersuits, and as we politely notify the thought police that we don’t fear them anymore, we will humbly and joyfully add our voices to the age-old conversation with and about God, a vigorous and vibrant conversation rooted in and inspired by the fascinating array of voices in the Scriptures.
PART II:
THE AUTHORITY QUESTION
9
Revelation Through Conversation
I was speaking somewhere the other day and the emcee introduced me by quoting a bunch of pretty outrageous (to me) things written about me on the Internet: “son of Lucifer, heretic, dim-witted, ignorant, arrogant, deceiver”—the same sorts of things said about abolitionists in the era of Nellie Norton, come to think of it. Everyone laughed, and I guess I chuckled too in an embarrassed sort of way, but I was struck again how angry people get when their conventional constitutional readings of the Bible are challenged. This is serious business, and I suppose I should be grateful that it’s only harsh words being bandied about. A few centuries ago we on this quest for a new kind of Christian faith might have been facing decapitation, burning at the stake, hanging, imprisonment, the rack, flailing, or (cringe) disembowelment. (It’s amazing what people have cooked up to do to others in the name of God.)1
The book of Job provides an excellent case study in approaching the Bible in a postconstitutional way. People who study Job notice that it has three distinct sections: a brief introduction in prose, a long middle section in poetry, and a short conclusion in prose. The introduction recounts a chat between the Satan and God. The Satan is a figure who has never appeared in the Bible up until this moment. (If you ask, “What about the serpent in Genesis?” I’d have to point out that the serpent is never called the Satan there. He’s just a talking serpent.) The Satan was apparently a character from Zoroastrian religion who was borrowed from Babylonian culture and maintained in Judaism by some “liberal” Jews we know as the Pharisees. (The more conservative Jews, the Sadducees, never accepted the Satan as a legitimate Jewish belief.)2
The Satan story in Job is pretty strange to our ears, and it creates a truckload of theological “problems” that we don’t need to go into here. (These problems are most acute for people who want Job to be a constitutional document that explains God’s official position on why suffering and evil exist in the world. They’re less thorny for those who expect Job to be an inspired portrayal of human beings struggling and arguing over the realities of suffering and evil.) By the end of the introduction, the Satan has, with God’s permission, destroyed Job’s so-called life—killed his children, destroyed his farm, covered his body with festering sores, and, in an act of savage mercy, left him only his wife, whose raging despair just makes things worse.
The middle of Job consists of a lot of long speeches. Job utters some of them, in which he basically says, “Why is this happening to me? What have I done to deserve this? I’ve been a good person. This is unacceptable. God is supposed to be fair, and what I’m experiencing isn’t fair.” Three of Job’s friends—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, later joined by the “angry young man” Elihu the Buzite—make the other speeches, in which they say, in various ways, “Job, stop talking like an idiot. You must have done something wrong. Good things happen to good people, and bad things to bad people, so God would never have let this happen to you, if you didn’t deserve it in some way. So stop whining and admit that you’re getting