The Bible’s beginning remains one of the hottest topics in all modern Christendom. The cosmological origins intrigue countless. Thus, the first chapter takes on pre-eminence in many minds. At the Bible’s outset, war wages over authenticity as an ancient document to continue to bear relevance in contemporary times.
Nowhere does the battle seemingly rage fiercer, perhaps, than its opening description. To attack its first premises leads one to discredit it entirely. This focus highlights the importance of getting things right from the beginning. To miss the mark here, it to lose much of its messaging altogether.
Much ink has been spilled over the inaugural verse. It alone has led many to postulate various ways in which to understand it. Amid such controversies, the initial word plays a crucial role. To pause and take it in bears much significance on all that follows.
Before diving in, most would understand, the Bible was written in another time, place, language to a people group quite out of sync with current worldviews. Often, attempts are made to allow concordance between what is written in antiquity to what one understands presently. Most certainly, in the concurrent world following post-modernism, readers wish to bring to bear on the text one’s views to find meaning in such an archaic text and relate it to what one views as existing systems of thought. Otherwise, why bother reading antiquated documents?
Has not its meaning expired over time, forgoing any relevance? To that end, is this blog intended to retrace the Scriptures’ messaging to bear out whether it is time to cast the Bible aside or to make it more relevant than it has been in recent history. Trends of the past couple of centuries have been to downplay them as unrelatable and unreliable. Most have chosen to discard them in favor of what they deem preferable.
The question is whether the preference is based solely on one’s wishing to impose a modern worldview onto them or learning to appreciate them for what they were and can still be in the mind’s eye if one is willing to allow one’s self to think as an ancient one would. This blog and my journey have been more so focused on the latter. To miss its original animus causes one to err in receiving what God wished to say back then to those people as primary. Before one can find contemporary significance to the text in the world as it is currently understood, one must first work out its initial messaging by embracing the world as they understood it.
A recent interview covering these basic ideas is where Rob and Hunter from Sentinel Apologetics interview Dr. John H. Walton on his often-overlooked Lost World Series book on Scriptures, The Lost World of Scripture: Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority. Dr. Walton highlights the importance of finding the first meaning of the Scriptures as they have been received. Following that understanding to root one properly, subsequent journeys into how its messages have been received down through the ages can help one find today’s impact. As promised, this blog intends to take its time to get through some profound material.
To hastily proceed is not to take one’s time to “stop and smell the roses,” as one dear fellow traveler on this journey to truth warned me. Eventually, I will try to address some of these finer details along the way as one works their way through to see how it once was understood to help me see how I might be able to understand what God wished to say then and apply it in my journey. For now, I think another pause is merited to allow for some more thoughts to permeate the landscape and bring one closer to long-forgotten realities that bear the most import into why I read the Bible the way I do.
I wish to remind those joining in that I do not necessarily read any given passage of the Bible in any one particular manner. I find the majesty of God’s Word to go far beyond one reading or even one person’s readings. Even if one had the time to sift through the centuries of how they have been read, I feel that there is so much more that could be said given human conventions’ frailty to express the inexpressible. You may have far grander ways of reading it.
That is the beauty of blogging whereby you, too, can blog them for the world to taste and see God’s goodness amid the chaos life brings every day into our lives. He speaks to all his body in many ways. I never wish to resort to the pettiness of the “right” way to read the Bible, trying to “trump” all others as if I hold some secret key that others are too far below me to see. I daresay it is I who need others to see it better.
The purpose of this blog is that many wish for me to share what I have seen thus far. I am inclined to have my reading tested and improved, having gone through the fire burning off what dross may stand in the way of its glorious beauty. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but seeing the text from another’s perspective opens up much more its grandeur. To contain it in one box is to own it. I believe it should own us rather than we try to own it.
