Questioning and listening

At church on Sunday, someone used the phrase ‘Putting yourself under the word’, meaning letting the Bible speak to you and influence you. But what, I wondered, does that look like in practice?

Another thing which inspired me this week was listening to my friend Iain  describing the day when, as a teenager, he was talking to a mate who had embraced the Christian faith in a more decisive way than he had up to that point. Ian said ‘I realised as he spoke that this was something I had to consider seriously.’

And then he described an instant in time as he walked home along the pavement, a red pillar box, a crisp moonless start-filled autumnal sky, a still serenity through which came the assurance that God was present, and that Iain believed.

And then on Saturday at lunchtime I was at the first of the Play Pieces series of short plays at the Spectrum Centre in Inverness to experience The Gospel Inquiry by Sandy Nelson. This satirical play aimed to test in a Leveson-like way the journalistic standards of the writers of the four gospels.

It raises important questions. How does our motivation for writing affect the way we describe our lives and our world? And how do the experiences and prejudices we bring as a reader to a piece of writing affect the meaning we find in it?

Some people would be unhappy with asking too many questions about the Bible and how it came to be written, and what exactly it means to regard it as God-given. They would say ‘Isn’t that sitting in judgement on it, rather than putting ourselves under it and letting it sit in judgement on us?’

But in my opinion it’s vital that we all think through our views on the Bible without burying any of the questions which the book gives rise to. It seems to me that people’s attitudes to the Bible range along a spectrum.

At the one end there are those Christians who believe that God was so precisely involved in the giving of each syllable in the text that it’s almost as though God dictated it. At the other end are those who believe that the Bible is no more than a collection of human documents written by people trying to make sense of life by creating and then developing ideas about a God who has no existence out-with human minds.

And somewhere near the centre of the spectrum are those who see the Bible as both a thoroughly human book recording encounters with the God who is there, but also a book in which the God who self-revealed to the Bible’s writers reaches out to us.

And in their thinking people move along this spectrum. Someone who has regarded the Bible as close to being God’s dictation comes to see it as more mysterious and imponderable, but no less satisfying. Someone else who has had no belief in God finds herself drawn through the text by a voice beyond the text.

We need to ask the questions, to ensure that our beliefs are living and real and not fossils laid down much earlier in our lives. And then with courage and humility, we must follow the insights our questioning gives rise to.

But even as we are questioning and thinking and wrestling with these strange, wonderful documents we need to let them speak to us. The words and sentences and chapters of this book have over the centuries been thin places where those who have listened with open minds and hearts have encountered God.

Our questioning must not be an arrogant dismissal of the text, but a humble, tentative act of listening for the voice which millions have heard through its pages. A God who has chosen to reveal through the writing of fallible human beings things we would otherwise never have known about God.

That’s why Iain’s story resonated with me. There was the discussion with his friend – the open-hearted questioning of someone who had found faith, and then there was that unforgettable moment of clarity by the post box. It’s often the same with the Bible – the faith that finds us even in the middle of our questioning gives birth to moments of encounter with the divine.

And so, as well as a ‘Gospel Inquiry’, I think we need a ‘me inquiry.’  How open am I to the possibility that God wants to meet me in the pages of this book? Is my prejudice and pride severing the link between the Bible and the one who breaths understanding through its pages?

And as Iain’s friend was the means through which the fire of faith burned bright in Iain’s heart, is the book of my fallible wavering life a text, a thin place through which God whispers?