The Word for Now
Disestablishment—The Church is being disentangled from the culture in a variety of ways, and that likely shapes our story, scripture, the Word. There was a time when the knowledge of our narratives was so ubiquitous in our culture that the Bible was almost a storehouse of double entendres and shaped the very language—people had “Damascus moments” and knew it referred to the Apostle Paul’s encounter with the living Christ, being a “Doubting Thomas” had more nuance to it than now, people were their “brother’s keeper” and knew if they weren’t they were “raising Cain”, folk once knew how to pronounce Methuselah, because their parents were as old as…
And there is some good to language and culture dripping with the Bible.
For example, having aha! moments that tied a common experience to the story of
God. Perhaps, at its best, this cultural familiarity allowed people to read
beyond the surface meaning, because the surface was already everywhere, it was
in the water. Everyone was already in the shallow end of the pool.
But these things go both ways, sometimes profound stories were taken as
profane laugh lines. Being in the shallows was all you needed for a modicum of
respectability, so that was all most people ever did.
Perhaps our general ignorance of
the story of God can let it speak afresh, perhaps scripture’s stories and
phrases can pack a punch in a different way now, maybe even lead us to
encounters with the One who is the Word Made Flesh.
Demographic
Shift—One of the aspects of demographic shift I’ve not written about as much is
generational shift. That different generations engage with aspects of the Faith,
differently. Case in point, there are generations for whom the categories of
books in their head are not hard cover or soft cover, but “dead tree” editions
or “e” editions. In what ways does the church need to tell that old old story
in new new ways? At the same time, how does the media shape the message? Is
there something incongruous about a Psalm Threads page, or an Instagram of
Paul’s letters or a Song of Songs podcast? What kind of Bible apps should we be
adapting and adopting?
Considering racial demographic
shifts in our country can also open our eyes to what scripture is saying. There
is a tendency to read scripture as if the people in question are white
Americans. That’s part of what happens in the inculturation process, it isn’t
something to be embarrassed about, just aware of. It has been in the DNA of a “general”
American reading the Bible since at least the pilgrims identified their new
home as a new promised land and they comparable to Moses and his generation.
Opening our eyes to the diversity
around us can help us see who is actually present in scripture. Folk from Asia
Minor and Ethiopia, Egypt and Rome, Persia and Greece. This hopefully helps us
to read scripture as a document with multiple cultural contexts, and humbles us
to read it with the eyes of a learner and a guest. We can rarely apply
scripture to our society via a flat reading of it.
For that matter, this can point
readers to the ways people have been misused scripture to benefit some and harm
others. Just two quick examples of this: When you read justifications of
segregation and tracts against interracial relationships there will inevitably
be references to Noah and his sons. Similarly, the number of old black folk who
will tell you that their grandma or grandpa refused to read the Apostle Paul,
because it was used for generations to justify slavery, is rather striking.
In short, awareness of racial
diversity in our society and in our scriptures can help us be better readers of
it. It can help us to see places where enculturated readings of scripture have
malformed its meaning and can help us hear God’s calling on our lives in new
and wonderful ways.
Decentralization—If
we want to talk about scripture being decentered, the truest place to go is post-modernity.
The best definition of post-modernity I’ve heard was from a bored high school
student who could see that a pack of adults weren’t getting it. She said, “post-modernity
means the stories we tell of how things connect to one another could be told
differently.”
So, a big part of what post-modernity is about is stories that can be
told multiple ways. Post-modernity brought with it the fracturing of metanarratives—any
big story about the world. Big stories can always be looked at outside
themselves (especially from their undersides), can be inverted, sliced, diced,
and mutated.
Much of Christianity is storytelling. We’ve got a big book that
Christians often describe as telling a singular story (everything from Basic
Instructions Before Leaving Earth to a literal history to a story of God as
King to our own Lutheran Law/Gospel lens), similarly we have big stories about
the Church’s spread, usually tied into the story of Acts of the Apostles, and
we have stories about authority (be it tracing a line to Peter, the great
commission, or a “second Pentecost” that occurred in the 1910’s or 1970s).
If these are all now suspect, or at least require regular and insistent
reexamination, then folk might have good reason to step back from the church,
either because they feel betrayed by the story they’ve been told being a
constructed one, or because it takes some real time and effort to think through
these things, and time is at a premium these days.
Much of our calling today is normalizing this reexamination, being
humbler and more honest about our own story, recognizing the multiplicity that
exists within canon (4 Gospels, multiple genres, a library etc.), and making
sure we don’t end with everything left on the cutting room floor—instead engage
creatively with the story of God, so that it might be the stories of God’s
people today too!
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