This is just a quick little thing I wrote about an essay I read for my preaching class.
The Bible is incomprehensible. The way a person is taught to live and understand and be in the world is counter to the way of life in the Bible. One is told that in order to gain one’s life they must lose it, that they are to love their enemies, that the meek shall inherit the Earth, that a Jewish Rabbi who was crucified by the Romans is actually the King of kings, that his Kingdom is here already but is still not yet and hundreds of other things that are totally preposterous when taken out and examined. Yet Karl Barth in his essay Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas might say that though it is crazy when read from this or that perspective or with this or that lense, that when it is read as the Word of God which is most perfectly lived out in the person of Jesus Christ it is truest truth.
Barth does a great job of making it clear that when we go into the Bible with a certain aim in mind with a specific perspective, historical or scientific or whatever it might be, that when we search its pages we come up lacking we grasp at something which is not there and was never meant to be there.
I guess my one critique about this essay though might be that in reading it, I felt as though Barth was just using rhetorical devices. It seemed like reading something a politician had said about something which they did not want to give an answer to. Barth said everything and nothing all in one essay.
Who could blame him though? We seek to know, with finite minds, an infinite God. Our surest asset in this quest is the Holy Scriptures which we must read with Jesus Christ as our guiding standard, whom we see lived out in Scripture. All this is utterly circular in logic. But when all that is, comes from the One who has always been, always is, and always will be, what other way can there be? Crazy huh?
What do you think?
to life