ken wilson online

It’s been nearly two months now of meditating my way through the psalms in a more daily-disciplined way. Man, what took me so long? I’ve made my way through psalm 18, so far. But this post isn’t about a particular meditation so much as a reflection on how much we’ve been missing it when it comes to engaging the Bible. Jesus and those of his generation must have mainly engaged the Bible through times of meditation. They didn’t scarf down the bible through reading long stretches of it at a time. They couldn’t have, not having their own copies. The Bible they had was the Bible they heard from each other and the Bible they had committed to memory, itself a form of meditation. Which brings me, to my point: it’s time that we moved beyond the severe limitations of the words “conservative” and “liberal” as descriptors for the way we approach the bible.

“Liberal” conveys a dismissive approach to the Bible. Critiquing the text from without using the tools of form criticism or deconstruction, and reducing it’s impact thereby. This was the approach to the Bible that trickled down from many of the mainline protestant seminaries in the second half of the last century into the mainline churches, contributing to the slow bleed in vibrant faith experienced in those churches. The response to this dismissive approach to the Bible was the “conservative” approach which was primarily a defensive maneuver: defending the Bible against attacks; waging the “battle for the Bible.”

Both approaches, however, involve standing outside the Bible, and treating it as a thing. Remember your grammar: “a noun is a person, a place, or a thing.” Both the liberal and the conservative approach the Bible has majored in treating it as a thing. Whereas the Bible is a place in which to meet a person: one’s self and one’s God; one’s self in relation to others, including God. Words being a portal into a person. The words of the Bible are meant to be entered, like a place, a room or a cave is entered.

This is what happens when you meditate on the words of a biblical text. You slip into the words and have something more like an “inside” experience of the words as contrasted with an “outside” experience of the words. Words being a conveyor of intimacy between persons. Liberal doesn’t describe the experience and neither does conservative. The words are neither dismissed nor defended, but entered.

I know so many young believers who grew up in a “conservative” camp regarding the Bible. They are often somewhat conflicted over the Bible. They know it’s power, but they also have an intuition that the defensive posture toward the Bible isn’t the life giving posture. They crave something other than that. But their minds have been formed to think there’s only two choices: either a defensive posture or a dismissive posture–conservative or liberal. And dismissive is not what they want.

I didn’t grow up in the conservative camp, so I need to listen and learn from these young people to understand their struggle better. But I think one of the keys to their moving beyond their dilemma regarding the Bible, is to learn the practice of meditating on the words of the Bible, so that they can have an experience of moving beyond either the “critique from without” or the “defense from without” into the pay-dirt territory of the words themselves: the words as a place to enter and in which to have personal encounter.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 6:59 am and is filed under beyond conservative-liberal, lectio (meditative prayer). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.