The entire Hebrew Bible speaks of the perfecting of man. Its entire purpose is to perfect man. Every sentence, every page radiates this attempt, to restore man to his former glory.
What we have in Jesus is this person that the entire Hebrew Bible has in mind. Seen from this point of view, it makes sense that all the stories point to him as it is he who lives what the Hebrew Bible only hints at as all the men in the book fall short. If it was not for the falling short, there would be no tales of the heights. For Christians, then, Jesus is this man. It is the original creation begun anew, not in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense yet this occurs only through the orignial physical creation.
Because of this I have no problem not taking it literally. The literalist position is a backlash against the views of science and is, in fact, using the very same tools to view the Bible which will always put such a person at a disadvantage because they are using someone else's tools rather than an interally developed set of tools (which, of course, is what the scientific community tends to mock).
There is a certain irony in this. Argues Tom Cheetham in his The World Turned Inside Out:
Science in the West may well have developed partly as a response to the dogmatic closure of official Christianity in an attempt to recover something of the angelic function of beings and to re-establish the means for the individual to attain knowledge.
Quoting Jacob Bronowski, he notes:
It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false...[Auschwitz] was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe they have the absolute knowledge...this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods...We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge.
Of course, scientists also fall prey to dogmatism. The letter kills. Dogma, more specifically the men wielding that dogma from a position of power, have killed the spirit and, quite literally, men. Scientists, religious people, serial killers, all coming from the position of power, the desire to be gods.
Science, in part, can be seen as a backlash to the closure of thinking, of individualization, of freedom. Men have taken this freedom of inquiry, turning it once again to, in this case, the Bible and, though thinking they are safeguarding it are, once again, killing through the letter. The inerrantist belief is thus a backlash against the inquiry of science, though using its tools, to once again return to dogmatism. We thus have the bursting forth of a growing movement of atheists, those who are not open to the innerantist Bible believers (and quite condescending to those who are 'liberal' in their views of the Bible, atheists of this sort as dogmatic as the innerantists, that it is an either/or proposition) and seek to silence them.
So is the New Testament, and the Bible in general, telling a literal, scientifically verifiable story? I don't think so. I think to bury the text in such historicity is to kill its spiritual import. It is to toss it right back into legalism.
Yet this does not mean it is myth, that it is fairy tale and legend with no verifiable history. In other words, it is not a lie (which is insinuated in such accusations). Yet the words of the Bible do come alive in those who believe it to be true and we begin to see the truth when we live our lives and we recognize how certain passages resonate and become relevant, meaningful and even freeing in our daily lives. This is the power of the living word.
And this word cannot be bound by dogma. We cannot toss out dogma as it safeguards from a relativism that is nothing more than Man as the measure of all things. But we must avoid the arrogation of the spirit of that dogma and become those very same people Jesus scolds in Matthew 23. While he may have been talking to the Pharisees in that passage, he speaks to all of us who claim to follow him today. We too can be Pharisees.
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