Milton Stanley - Jaroslav Pelikan on Reading the Bible

Milton Stanley has a great quote from Jaroslav Pelikan on reading the Bible.  Before I share it, I want to mention that it reminds me of a story I once heard Henry Krabbendam tell (or at least I think it was Henry) about how people who admire the Bible often don't read it.  There was a young man who was going off to seminary and his father was afraid that the seminary was going to be liberal and was going to cause him to lose his confidence in the Bible.  Being aware of scholarly debates about the authenticity of the book of Jonah, the father told his son many times "don't lose Jonah."  The son would say "don't worry dad I won't."  This went on many times until finally the son said "dad, you'll lose Jonah before I will."  The dad said this was nonsense.

So the son went off to seminary and returned a few years later.  When he came home the first thing his dad asked him was "did you lose Jonah?"  The son said "no dad, but you did."  The dad said this was nonsense again.  So the son went and took his dad's bible off the shelf and opened it to the book of Jonah and found that the book of Jonah had been cut out of the dad's Bible.  The son told his dad that he had done this years ago, before he went off to seminary - the dad lost Jonah because he never read it.

Now, on to the quote from Pelikan via Milton Stanley:

An appalling ignorance of the Bible seems to have become epidemic in our time. . . .

Yet like the beauty ever ancient, ever new of a Byzantine icon or of Gregorian chant, the stately cadences of the Book of Psalms and the haunting beauty of the Bible do run the constant danger of getting in their own way. The very familiarity of the Bible after all these centuries can dull its sharp edges and obscure its central function, which is not only to comfort the afflicted but to afflict the comfortable, including the comfortable who are sitting in the pews of their synagogue or church as they listen to its words. If it is true that every age manages to invent its own particular heresies, our own age seems especially vulnerable to an aetheticism . . . that finds the ultimate mystery in transcendence, "the mystery that awes and fascinates," in the beauty of art and music, which have the magical capacity to transport us into an otherworldy realm without at the same time calling us to account for our sins in the presence of the holy God and righteous Judge of all mankind.

To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments neatly laid out on a table and hanging on
a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished---until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from "How shiny and beautiful they are!" to "Get that damned thing out of my mouth!" Once I begin to read it anew, perhaps in the freshness of a new translation, it stops speaking in cliches and begins to address me directly. Many people who want nothing to do with organized religion claim to be able to read the Bible at home for themselves. But it is difficult to resist the suspicion that in fact many of them do not read it very much. For if they did, the "sticker shock" of what it actually says would lead them to find most of what it says even more strange than the world of synagogue or church.

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Comments

[Jake Belder]

I like convicting posts like this one.

...and off topic, but you are the one to contact about being added to the PCA blog roll list?

[pgepps]

T. S. Eliot points out, contra those who speak of "The Bible as Literature," that the Bible manifested and provoked literary greatness for those who regarded it as TRUE--and that for a culture which has ceased to regard it as true, it must also cease to be beautiful. I find this the more convincing because Eliot, an expert on literature and literary history, is himself perhaps *not* one to be expected to articulate a very conservative line on Scripture--similar to my appreciation of the very-not-Fundamentalist C. S. Lewis' criticisms of Bultmann.

Cheers,
PGE

[John]

Great stuff!

On an unrelated note, I see your ad for Peter Leithart's A Great Mystery in your left-hand column. I'm excited to see that book coming out, not least because my own wedding sermon is in there! =)