"The Fidelity of Betrayal"

So I'm reading this book by Peter Rollins, "The Fidelity of Betrayal." He's a Christian philosopher - some of his stuff is pretty deep & complex --- this particular passage was super interesting to me.

"Indirectly Approaching the Word"

As most of us know, the Bible is often approached as a text that lays bare the mind of God, as that which graciously offers us a God's-eye view of the world. This view supposes that by reading the book faithfully we can uncover the intentions, ideas, and desires of the Creator. In contrast to this, I am charting the idea that we ought to approach the text as actually manifesting the felt concealment of God. Here the central Word of the text is never directly grasped as a source of knowledge, but rather is encountered as a life-transforming event.

The point then is not to engage in a hermeneutical approach that would seek to somehow expose the mind of God, but rather to embrace a radical hermeneutics (a reading that sets the text free from the idea of a single correct meaning) that seeks to ultimately move beyond the desire to reduce the text to descriptive statements, inviting instead an ongoing transformative dialogue with the text. This way of reading the Bible asks much more of each individual reader, and offers the professional Bible critic much less authority. For the idea of the Word of God as a description of the central Event that dwells within the words and yet is not of them (just as Jesus was in the world but not of it) helps us to understand that however interesting the work of the biblical scholars, the theologians, the fundamentalists, or the intellectual skeptics may be, the true depth the text of the text is not to be discovered by following their exacting methods.

If the Word of God referred to the factual claims within the Bible, then the true experts of the Word would be the academics who understand when these words were written, what the context was in which they were written, and what influences were at work in the composition. In addition to this, the legitimacy of the Word of God would always rest upon the answers one gave to questions such as when the earliest accounts of Jesus' life were written, whether or not they were recorded by eyewitnesses, whether there was a political agenda at work, whether the information in the text matches up with what we know about historical and geographical data, and so on.

What happens when the depth of the text is thought to be swallowed up in a rational approach like this is an externalization and objectification of faith. Here the words are analyzed, contextualized, and grasped by those who are not necessarily taken up by the depth of the event housed within them. Like someone who analyzes a parable without ever touching upon its transformative power, a purely academic understanding of the text, however brilliant, will always be a (mis)understanding. To believe that the words are the Word reduces the text to what can be named, described, and transcribed. To treat it in this way means that we approach the Word as a thing that stands before us to be examined, poked, prodded, and played with. The Word of God, in this reading, thus refers to something, some thing, some set of things.

The idea that faith involves engaging in an ongoing transformative dialogue instead of seeking some static, final understanding of God and the world can be seen to inform the Jewish anecdote that speaks about a young man who is seeking out an old and learned rabbi to be schooled in the wisdom of Hebraic logic.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AaUBAgsm8E

(In this video he shares the story......watch it before you read on!!!...its not long i promise)

Here we encounter the idea that before the young man could ever begin training in the deep wisdom of the tradition he must first learn how to give up the desire to reduce truth to some single, defined, unchanging, propositional system. He must learn to dialogue, to debate, to rethink, to critique. Only then can he begin the journey toward a mode of religious understanding that goes deeper than epistemological insight (the realm of the scientific disciplines) - discovering a truth more profound than mere intellectual claims.

It is all too common for Christians to attempt to do justice to the scriptural narrative by listening to it, learning from it, and attempting to extract a way of viewing the world from it. But the narrative itself is asking us to approach it in a much more radical way. It is inviting us to wrestle with it, disagree with it, content with it, and contest it - not as an end in itself, but as a means of approaching its life-transforming truth, a truth that dwells within and yet beyond the words.

And, so, in our desire to remain absolutely, totally and resolutely faithful to the Word of God, we come face to face with the idea that we must be prepared to wrestle with, question, and even betray the words. Only when we have broken with our initial naivete and have embraced a passionate, critical engagement with the text can we ever hope to enter into that second naivete and be embraced by the truth that is affirmed there.