Saturday, October 25, 2008

What is the Bible, and How?

I have become much too busy to keep up the blog. For the next several months, I'll only be able to get in a few intermittent posts, likely sharing or commenting on pericopes from what I'm reading or regarding something I'm working on. For now, I wanted to share an excerpt from Charles Wood, The Formation of Christian Understanding (p 105, italics in original):

"The Bible is an assemblage of greatly differing strategies for recollecting, interpreting, and sharing the community's witness concerning God. They defy harmonization. They do clash. It is impossible--not simply an overwhelmingly difficult task, but, at times, a logically impossible one--to affirm them all simultaneously. The fact that the church can use this collection of material as its canon does not preclude the possibility and necessity of sifting through its individual components with a critical eye, and making some judgments, in the light of the canon itself, as to the Christianness of some of its components, individually considered. To put the point briefly. Scripture as canon must rule the Christian use of scripture as source. The biblical canon assists the critical appropriation of biblical tradition. How this happens remains to be considered."