(Getting to the game late! Lunch was good ... Too good)
What in the Bible is cultural and therefore no longer relevant to you?
The irrelevant items got moved to the no-longer-relevant cultural bucket.
We're going to handle some texts differently than we do others?
What is eternal and relevant and cultural and not? Not a good question when reading Scripture.
We're trying to ferret out what is cultural and what is not. Why not ask a different question?
Can we get at the heart of what is relevant better?
I wonder if there aren't many metaphors that serve us better in a postmodern context than the Bible as a life manual.
Need to see the Bible with new metaphors, new lenses, new sightings, new learnings.
We assume that Scripture being God-breathed means to find all the propositions you can and beat your neighbor over the head with it.
How is the inspired text profitable to us?
One of the hottest topics in Christendom right now around homosexuality ... Maybe it's not as easy as we first thought.
Maybe it's a cultural problem more than an eternal problem.
So being the inspired word of God means you look for one-to-one analogs and do the same thing the person in the story does? No.
The Bible is a classic. We just happen to think it's an inspired classic.
You + God + Bible = you think everything you think is correct.
The Bible as a score ... a jazz score. One of the things about a jazz score, to do improv well you have to be fully immersed in the score.
(Sidenote, it would be way hard to preach right after lunch. Everyone in hear is in a food coma. Low, low energy)
(There is way too much good stuff to get on here ... I will do my best to keep up.)
The Gospels have four different perspectives BECAUSE God wanted different perspectives. They're supposed to be a little squishy!
The gospel writers did not write with the mindset of being historically accurate ... Diff elements of the gospel are arranged differently in each for gospels ... And that's OKAY!
The Bible as five acts ... The first four acts are the Bible and we, as God's people, are the fifth act!
In other words, our goal is to not repeat the previous four acts ... But to live out the act in front of us.
The Q'ran tells us to not complain. Hindu literature tells us to not complain. The Bible tells us not to complain. But what is unique to Scripture is the STORY behind the whole book...
Let's read the Bible as a STORY
"Atomizing" the text = fracturing the Bible into little, itty-bitty pieces to the point where it loses its meta-narrative
The reductionist tendencies of modern Biblical scholarship is destroying the life-giving power of the story found in the Bible.
