Where Are We Going!
Over the next few articles we are going to cover three areas:
- The Western world’s penchant for minutia and the breaking of the Story into fragments.
- How Story is an antidote for this fragmentation.
- The concept of the Kingdom of God as a prism through which we can understand the Story of God.
Houston, “We Have a Problem…”
One of America’s finest hours in space flight came when an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13. The quote “Houston, we have a problem” is actually a misquote. I know, Tom Hanks delivered the line flawlessly in the movie. The actual quote is “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” This was a major problem for those on board the Odyssey. The crew in space and the crew in Houston had to put their minds together to solve this problem and bring the three astronauts back to earth safely.
It is natural when a problem occurs to try to find a solution. But, what happens when we don’t even realize that we don’t even know that we have a problem? This is the situation with millions of readers of Scripture. We have a problem when we read Scripture and we may not even know it. I remember sitting with a friend having breakfast. He had read something that week that I had written and wondered out loud. I don’t think that I have a problem reading Scripture. On one level, he was correct. If you can pronounce the words, you are reading. But, the intent of what I had written was the very point he was making. He thought that because he could read the words, he was reading the text with complete understanding. He was completely clueless that he had a “reading problem.” He didn’t realize that the very format that he was reading the text in was itself the problem.
Snippet Reading
The little known but very large problem in Scripture reading is the fragmentized way in which we have come to read it: A little snippet here and a little snippet there, a Bible bit here and a Bible bit there. So, if it is a problem, and it really is, what do we do about it?
We shall continue…
You must log in to post a comment. Log in now.