Entries Tagged 'Inspiration' ↓

Historians report that transitions can take twenty-five years to shake out. But once the pieces fall together and things settle, grandchildren often look back and ask, “You mean you did it that way?” One of the most difficult things to do when you’re living in the middle of a transition is to recognize the shifts and adjust in reel-time. As a result faith communities struggle to understand declines and solutions. Often church leaders rely on what they know best-the experienced successes of the recent past. A large percentage of congregations are relying on what worked early in the 21-first-century; the crafting of the attractional worship model. 

People of faith must embrace a kingdom imagination and take our enculturated lives seriously. We start when we change the terms of the conversation. We no longer critique, consume, or copy culture-we make culture.

We must ask why so few are willingly die to themselves in community? Why we so rarely journey from self-dependence through the valley of death to life in the Spirit in the presence of a connecting guide? Where are the spiritual leaders, the elders of God’s people? Where are the spiritual leaders, the shepherds of the flock? Where are the people who can listen well and guide us through our problems to the Father’s heart and regard it as their calling to do so? Whatever became of the idea that all believers are priest?

Our communities are filled with people desperate to unburden themselves in the presence of another, to be known at a level where the only antidote to disdain is grace, to sink beneath death’s dark waters while in the grip of a set of strong hands that promise to raise them up into newness of life.

In recent conversations, I’ve asked a number of Christ-followers if they had someone in their lives whose strength and wisdom encouraged them to make themselves fully known. Every last one of them answered the same way: “I’d give my right arm to have someone like that in my life. There’s so much going on inside me that I’d love to share, not to find answers necessarily but just so someone knew. But I have no one like that.”

Some of the answers I’ve heard in defense of Scripture’s inspiration have run rough-shod over common sense. And to think that my early polemic-bent life once used such biased arguments (actually, the correct word would be parroted) in Scripture’s defense (as if God’s words need me to defend them) shocks me. I can no longer leap-frog good common sense. If the answers we have parroted in the past were given as answers on a final exam we would find big red Xs all over our paper.

Let me give you just one example and then reflect on it for a few minutes. Don’t hurriedly jump to conclusions. Don’t resort to traditional answers. Instead, think independently…and with good common sense. Let’s attempt to stand outside the bible and then ask ourselves if the pat-answers we have given others through the years, in defense of the Scripture, makes any good sense.

Here we go…

How could Moses have written the Torah when he had been dead for three hundred years before the first verse of the Torah had been written? These five books reflect multiple strands of material that were put together over a period of approximately five hundred years. Deuteronomy even provides us with Moses’ death and burial. It would take a rather remarkable author to record in his writings that particular moment of his life–his death.

Does my thinking somehow destroy the integrity of the Scriptures? I don’t think so. Maybe it has more to do with how one understands inspiration.