Living Consciously: bible reading

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:1

The bible isn’t enough. It’s incomplete, inadequate. If Christians try to follow only the Bible then we miss out. God existed before Genesis 1:1. God interacted with humans between 300BCE and 0CE. And God was not dead after the early apostles stopped writing letters to the church. What we have in the Bible is a partial story of God interacting with people, but it’s not the whole thing. We need to live on more.

We run a great risk giving too much credence to the Bible. We risk missing Jesus’ whole point of coming to earth. We seem to understand his death and resurrection, the story of God’s amazing grace, but Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion. Jesus came to start a new, loving way of life. I’m afraid that misuse of the Bible transforms it into a prescription for Christian religion. Out of that we may draw the important things, like grace and forgiveness and love, but we also get rules, like you have to be baptized before you can receive Holy Communion, that don’t follow from Jesus’ teachings.

See, rules are easier. Especially for western churches, it’s easier for us to organize something if we already have a base set of rules and standards. So we take the most concrete thing we have, the Bible, and we mold it into a handbook for how to live a godly life. And then some of us miss so much because our views are too narrow.

The Bible has great value. Don’t misunderstand me here. I’ve devoted a huge chunk of my life to it; I will continue to read it every day for the rest of my life; and I’m about to start three years of seminary study that will inundate my head with Biblical knowledge. I love the Bible, but as a follower of Jesus I can’t limit myself to its words.

The Bible is our best reference for specific stories and examples of how God interacted with people. It’s our best glimpse into the person of Jesus Christ and the transformative power of his great love for humanity. It’s a wonderful tool for connecting Christians across continents and cultures. We need to know these things, but it’s only a base of our Christianity. This is only a starting point for how we live.

In his teaching, Jesus did not address every topic. Where Jesus did not speak, we look to Paul and hope that he addressed the topic. If Paul didn’t mention it, then we turn to our community, our churches, we rely on the Holy Spirit to discern what we ought to believe, how we ought to live. At first glance that seems OK to me, but I’m not sure it is throughout life. I will not discredit any of those steps of the process, but I want to empower the Holy Spirit speaking to individuals a lot sooner.

People can lie and deceive. Sometimes it’s intentional and sometimes it’s not. I understand why the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation wanted to limit the public access to the Bible and didn’t want to empower individuals to interpret the Bible. That’s a messy process. Mistakes will be made. That’s still true today, but I think we’ve come a long way since the 16th century. People are more connected; scholastic work is more available. We still make mistakes, but I think we have a greater chance of living Biblically-centered, Holy Spirit-led lives.

What I’m talking about here are personal, daily, possibly mundane decisions that people make. If you don’t know what your church would advocate for or what Jesus would do, or exactly what the Bible would say, then trust the Holy Spirit working within you. Take a step, take action. There are hands to help us up if we fall down. There is forgiveness if we mess up.

I think the Christian church would be so much more obedient to God’s will if individuals were encouraged act without the restrictions of what may or may not be Biblical. We all need to read and study the Bible, but no one can know the fullness of God’s revelation. If something seems to contradict the Bible, then the community needs to step in because a nudging of the Holy Spirit may have been misinterpreted. No one should view themselves as greater than their Christian community, but no one should see themselves as less than an integral part of their Christian community and God’s mission in the world.

Read the Bible. Get to know Jesus and the nature of who he was. Continually ask the Holy Spirit to guide you. Then live and act and make decisions knowing that God will use you and never forgetting that humans (including yourself) are imperfect, but loved nonetheless.