Bible and Jesus

Two of the most contentious issues in the more liberal parts of the Christian church in the US and predominantly among those who are baby boomers and of the WW II generation are around how to understand and accept the Bible and what to believe about Jesus. A vital issue in the former is how these two generations are children of the enlightenment and are very focused on "belief" as something more intellectual whereas previous generations and even younger generations today were more focused around belief and faith coming out of story which speaks a truth beyond verifiable fact of history or science. The englightenment reduced truth down to fact and lost the meaning of story as truth.

In the latter of Jesus, we face a similar situation around truth, story, fact and intellect. But also, experience. When life is reduced down to simply filtering through what WE "know" prior so we can control our experience, we lose much of the serendipitous nature of God's creation and revelation.

I invite you to visit a few pages of our web site which I think are probably some of the best collections of links on the internet in regard to these matters.
http://www.fairlawnwest.org/biblepg.htm
http://www.fairlawnwest.org/bibcrit.htm
http://www.fairlawnwest.org/purpose.html

I also encourage you to consider being a part of the new Wed night discipling group which is using Brian McLaren's book "A New Kind of Christian." I have begun also to use this book in the individual mentoring relationships that I am part of weekly with some folks from our F-W community. We are ordering a whole slew of these books for our bookstore because they keep selling out.

The paradox I find is how we claim the identity of "Christian Church" but will try to eliminate the reality of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Bible as scirpture, which is what becoming Protestant was all about in the first place. I don't wish to avoid conversation about these topics, but by trying to avoid or reduce or shift the central tradition of these in the midst of the Christian Church is like trying to claim the Cleveland Indians are a professional badmitton team when they have been a professional baseball team for over 100 years. Or its like trying to claim that the two narratives of creation in the beginning of the book of Genesis are science, when they began as vision and truth and story beyond story. For instance, when I tell the story of my family history, how much fact is there in it? 95%...or less? When I talk of my daughters, how much am I exaggerating, how much is hope and dream and how much is fact? 100% fact!!!! You get my point. There are important places in the life story of us as individuals, as families, as a church, as a people where truth transcends fact. When we try to reduce everything down to verifiable fact and take away the story and even the mystery, we have lost God! For if we can prove God...then who is in control and in charge...us or the one we have just proven and named God?

These are essential and vital topics of communication for us. They are not to be avoid ed or to be rejected. But there are places of boundary of identity that all of us have and need for who we are as individuals, in our genders, in our nationality...and who we claim to be as the body of Christ. The center of all that are the highest holy days of our life...Maundy Thurs, Good Fri and Easter...and the story that surrounds them. That is the journey we are on now in the season of Lent. Questions, doubts, hopes, faith, and belief. All, but none to the exclusion of the other.