Words, words, words.

LongDistanceConversations

Last week I finished a book called "Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?" by William G. Dever. This archaeologist reinforces what I've been learning for the past couple of years; the Bible is not a history book. It most certainly is a history of a people in the ancient Near East. But we'd do better to understand it as an imaginative telling of history. Tat may seem frustrating to some (myself included) but ultimately the issues of social justice and subverting oppressive authorities in the name of YHWH lies at the heart of the OT.

In my opinion this affords us the opportunity to view our faith in much more realistic terms. Rather than beating the drum of literalistic foolishness where the earth is 7,000 years old and dinosaurs don't quite fit, we ca embrace what scholarship has to say. We can engage the world around us instead of hiding in the wilderness on our compunds.

Okay, so I'm exagerating a bit. But, the fact still remains that we'll do better by wrestling with our faith, even if we wind up a little hurt at the end of the night, than we will being idiots believing in fairy tales. Does that mean that I don't believe in things like the bodily resurrection of Jesus? No, I still believe that. In fact none of the essential elements of my faith are lost by saying that the Flood, Exodus and quite a few other OT things didn't take place in the same way or scale that the Bible says. I believe that there was a monotheistic group in Canaan who posed a social, political and reliious threat to the rulers of their day. That group eventually became Israel, a nation totally different from the pagan world around it that cried out for and yielded a messiah (king), lord and savior to deliver them from these wicked kings and emperors. But that king ended up doin for the world what so many only wanted for themselves.

That's an incredibly over-simplified way of telling that tory. But we all get the point; truth is bigger than facts.

Grace and Peace