EATING THE WORD, 7

I will make this the last post on the Bible for a while. Rather than blog about it, I need to go and do it! And that is the thing about the word – it demands a response. Perhaps that is the reason why many of us find the Bible so difficult to read – we prefer things that don’t make demands of us. Generally speaking books are easier to handle than people, because books don’t make the same demands of us:

Many of us prefer words written to words spoken. It is simpler, we are more in control, we don’t have to deal with the complexities of difficult, neurotic, or insufferably boring people. If we don’t like what we are reading we can shut the book and pick up another – or go shopping, or take a walk, or spend an hour or so in the garden.

The trouble with the Bible is that when we shut it and try to ignore it, we are not merely putting down a book. In a real sense we are shutting ourselves to a person, to God.

Peterson says that we have been taught the “hermeneutics of suspicion” by the likes of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. We are sceptical and cynical about everything and everyone. We might never have read a word of Nietzsche, Marx or Freud, but their teachings permeate every aspect of our culture. Rather than feeding ourselves on the toxin-laden bread of our culture we need to eat the word, because what the Bible teaches us is a “hermeneutics of adoration” – it enables us to “see how large, how splendid, how magnificent life is.” In the Bible we see God and the largeness of his story; and we are compelled to worship.

Eat the word!