To Value the Living Word of God

My claim is simple: we have lost a sense of the value of the word and the story. This is especially the case with the Holy Bible. We want more and more, as Kierkegaard said, “In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further.”

What do we value more than the word? Mostly, I think, we value the hard facts. We value what we can know. What we value isn’t so much the words, or the scripture, but the potential for our story to fit with the evidence, to fit with the reality of the world behind the text. We too often value the evidential facts, and too little value the wondrous story of God.

What’s behind the text is valued more than the text itself—that’s my claim.

How does this devaluing of the text happen? Two ways, primarily:

1) We try to historically demonstrate or prove God’s reality offstage, beyond the words of the Holy Bible itself. This is the more conservative way of devaluing the scripture. The aim of the effort is toward some sense of knowledge, reasonable certainty or in the more fundamentalist aims, a strong sense of certainty. God becomes a sort of hypothesis that can be proven true or false—outside the Biblical context.

2) We ask ourselves and perhaps others: “could this really happen?” We doubt the word as it is written and so we reach beyond the text to find what really happened—to find the facts of the matter which are surely far less extraordinary and far more tame than what the Bible says. This is the more liberal way of devaluing the scripture.

This struggle between 1 and 2 has set the tenor for much of the unfolding conversation around Christian circles for the past 200 plus years. And so as I say, the value of the words of the Holy Bible themselves have been reduced. More important than the words are the factual events that happened beyond the text—these facts validate the words. The facts give the words significance, not that the words have significance in and of themselves.

Given this situation, how might we re-value the scripture?

In more personal terms, we need to worry more about the potential and actual effects of our words and stories. Our words have the power to hurt and to reconcile, to evoke anger and happiness, to praise and to curse. Words do more than simply fit reality; they are in some sense evocative and constitutive of our world, our relations, our sense of who we are.

The Holy Bible, for ourselves and our communities, can thus be seen as the material substance that enables us to live out the drama of the kingdom of God. The word nourishes. We can locate ourselves in the big story, the drama of salvation, which is usually championed as the core of biblical faith. Or we can draw from the many small, disordered and disjointed dramas that fill the Holy Bible, as we gracefully and freely work the text in a new way that bears fruit.

But here is the essential point of what I’m saying: take the Holy Bible as the living, breathing word of God, as a script that contains all the ingredients for a whole and undivided life. The transformative power of indwelling in the way of Jesus is not a matter of whether the Gospels are backed up by the evidence. The very question of evidence beyond the text effectively devalues the written scriptures. Wrestle with the word of God on its own terms.