Living Spiritual Rhythms - November 30

Never before have humans been in a position to know so much, yet to know so little about how much there is still to be known, which seems so vast and somewhat unpredictable. Science has surely played a significant role in informing us for centuries. Nowadays, scientific advances are monumental. Just think of genomics and the neurosciences. I don’t mean to say that science always gets it right. Nevertheless, when it gets it wrong, it tends to be at least somewhat self-correcting. In addition to science, many suggest that the biblical text has also contributed in major ways to informing us. Its centrality has a long tradition and the history of interpretation through the OT to the NT flows out to us today. But what more than ever has to be addressed is the stature of this text as the center piece of Christian belief. Thus, when it comes to the biblical text, reliability and authority are weighty and vital issues that pertain to the ‘status’ of the text. It is not viable to comment, as some do, ‘well, the Bible says,’ because this assumption of expertise actually presupposes the validity of the very text that’s in question. Sometimes there’s not much self-correcting going on here. Furthermore, behind this text and the crucial matter of its standing is the primary and inescapable question about the God it refers to. Unless Christians are willing to dig deep and come up with something plausible concerning the value and place of the biblical text and its God, the legitimacy of the former will surely fade, while the credibility of the latter could also diminish in a substantial manner.