Well it's the political season. So what? I ran across this link on another blog and read the article/petition "God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat." Well shucks, that's gonna freak some folks out! What's going on when one has to state the obvious? This call to sign a petition, which I am not suggesting by pointing it out that one should sign, is from Sojourners, a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice.
My problem with the petition lies in another realm. The persistent misuse of little bits of Scripture to argue a point or state a position as if that validates the point or position. Verse quoting sucks! I think it may even turn God’s stomach. Verse quoting suggests that we can do a better job of putting Scripture together than God did. I often wonder aloud how the church made it through some 1500 years with out a versified Bible. Sometimes I think that we ought to have a book burning party ala Acts (Ooops that may be over the top, well, maybe not).
The Bible is God’s story. It is not God’s promise box full of little nuggets to rip out of context and quote at will. Fragmented memorization and quoting of verses produces fragmented followers of Jesus. The many and varied Bible programs both online and desktop only exacerbate the problem by the endless algorithms for searching and then presenting one with verses as a result (of course they can do more than that in most programs). You would have thought that God would have been smart enough to have written us a versified Bible or maybe even a topical Bible which is the child of versification, maybe God should have just skipped all the authors of the Old and New Testament, those poor shmucks who didn’t know anything about the joy of fragments, and had Nave born centuries earlier and had him produce his topical Bible. Wonder why God didn’t just give us a group of propositions like 7,777 of them so we could just mark off the ones we have “applied” to our lives. Yep, that would have done the job.
Hooray for Eugene Peterson, may his move to have Bibles without verses conquer the publishers of the world.
BTW: if you choose to read the article/petition and see the quotes by the infamous duo of Falwell and Robertson, note that for the most part the writers have produced another form of versification, i.e., leaving out something form the whole story. The use of the ellipsis (…), one in the Falwell quote and two in the Robertson quote points again to using fragments to prove a point. I wonder what was left out. Verses suck, whether fragments of Scripture that do not share the whole sense of the story they appear in or fragments in quotes that do the same! BTW: This is not a vote for what Falwell and Roberson are quoted as saying, it is a vote against not quoting all of what they were saying.
Is there an antidote available? Yes, it’s story. I wonder what it would be like if we began to memorize stories from the Bible and told them as answers to questions?
Okay I feel a little better, with the optimum word “little.”
Posted by drwinn at August 23, 2004 10:53 AM