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The Evolutionary Trajectory of the Story of God: The Mystique

Part One - An Introduction

So I’ve been thinking about how to connect all of my thoughts on this. So they sort of build from one to the other. Either I’m too lazy or unimaginative, but I’m having trouble connecting everything in a succinct way. So the next week or so may be more like disconnected thoughts rather than an intelligent, well-built argument for my perspective.

Anyway . . . here’s my first thoughts on the story of God, aka scripture.

Growing up the Bible was always kind of the missing part of the Trinity. You had God, you had Jesus, you had the Holy Spirit. In my particular tradition, I got the feeling that people were pissed off that God didn’t make the Bible animate and include it as the 4th person of the Trinity.

As a kid, you pledged allegiance to the bible. You didn’t use it as a coaster. You didn’t lay it on the floor. You held it with both hands. You respected it. It was the “word” and the “word” was alive (excuse my sarcastic tone - while I still believe it speaks and is very much alive, I do so in a way that is way less creepy than the book with arms and legs version that haunted my youth).

It was almost like the thing had eyes. You were scared to make out with a girl if the bible was in the same room because you were scared it would see and run go tell Jesus. You were scared to cuss out your parents under your breath if it was on your dresser. So you had to move it to the closet or the bookcase.

Then again maybe this is all just me and the fault of growing up in a hyper-guilt culture that had me scared straight because God wanted to shoot me until Jesus took the bullet for me.

Either way, you didn’t mess around with the bible. It was serious business. It was like the ark of the covenant. Drop it or mess it up and God might strike you down. Or make you celibate.

All of this played part in creating a super-spiritual, dare I even say holy mystique around the book with the gold trimmed pages. If you were reading it, God was there. If you were reading it, God was talking to you. If you were reading it, God was making sure you “got it”.

While I think God is very much a part of his own story and extremely interested in my understanding of how his story has unfolded through the ages, I think I got a raw deal as a kid.

If you asked me to give you the first word that came to my mind when I thought of the bible, I would have said “holy”. After all it was right there on the front.

If you asked me now, I think I would say “human”.

I never saw the humanity of the bible growing up. I never saw the authors. I never saw their circumstances. I never saw their context.

I would read a story in the Old Testament and immediately say “Jesus said let my people go”. Or I’d read about Paul’s conversations with Timothy and instead of seeing Paul and Timothy, I would internalize the story as Jesus lecturing Timothy.

There were no characters. Or rather they were minimized. They kind of got in the way. They were mild annoyances.

The bible was God and God was the bible. It was a big book of God. A big indistinguishable pile of God.

There was no nuance. No humanity. No story. No people.

Just God and the lessons he wanted to teach us about heaven by using these little people like Moses and Peter and Mary and Noah, which I later found in school weren’t actually individual people at all but rather part of some “scarlet thread of redemption” that served as a metaphorical pre-incarnate Christ.

So growing up . . . I only associated the bible with God. God and nothing else.

I mean how many people read the first chapter of John like this, “In the beginning was the bible and the bible was with God, and the bible was God”?

As a kid that can be very misleading.

Listening: Blue Sky Blue - Wilco

[tags]Scripture, Bible, Scripture + Evolution[/tags]

© 2007 IAmJoshBrown.