Bible Book Talk

In reading blogs written by Christians, particularly those of ministers, I discovered that the viewpoints of its author and those of the comments, are made by individuals involved in a book talk. That is, they have read the same book and are now engaged in a discussion of what was meant by a particular passage or what the book's author might have to say on a modern subject if He were walking among us today. It is a group of readers that are the theologians and laypeople discussing the finer points of The Holy Bible and the characters within the book's pages with whom I find conflict.

The intrigue comes when I read a blog and accompanying comments and read phrases like, "this is what God would want" or "He did such and such because...". I am always struck that mire mortals are explaining God and His book. What do they know? Did God come to them in a vision or speak to them on the side of a mountain? Maybe so, I don't know, but it seems like there are a lot of opinions out there about scripture and what it says to us. Explanations written as if they were God's scribe and had the inside scoop to His thoughts and motives.

It is very confusing to me. Who and what do we believe? Well, the answer is obvious, we believe God and His Word. So why all of these interpreters? Opinions dive bomb us like a swarm of mosquitoes and I find myself slapping at them and running for cover to get away. I am presently in a reading slump which was my way of "running for cover". There are an infinite number of articles and books written by religious authors packed in bookstore shelves and spread across the World Wide Web. My personal preference is to read authors that write to the average person of average intelligence. I have attempted to read difficult books by authors with Dr. in front of their names, but unless I read it with a dictionary and lexicon nearby, I don't understand even one paragraph of what they are saying. What was their point in writing? Was it to prove their superiority of the written word? If we can't understand the points they make, then what is their motives in writing? I don't know, but I have diverted from my topic.

There was a time that I thought if I didn't read Church of Christ authors, I wasn't getting information from a viewpoint that agreed with mine. Of course, you can see the flaws in that. If that is all I read, then that is all I know. Isn't there a great chance that my viewpoint is skewed? Isn't is possible that my teachers had it all wrong or at least some of it? So I've read authors from other religious faiths, not too many because first and foremost, I'm not an "avid reader" as educators would call a person that is passionate about reading. If I can't breeze through a book or article with little difficulty in comprehension, I will pass on it. However, all of the authors and all of their diverse opinions on what the Word is saying is like slapping those mosquitoes. Once again I find myself running for cover.

If the Bible was written by inspired authors with God as their "pen" so to speak, then why all the commentary? Why can't I just read it for what it says and believe what it says? Why do men/women feel it necessary to comment on "What Jesus Would Do?". I'm dumbfounded by the discussions of Christians' post on the Internet that will ramble on and on over a particular word that was used by a writer voicing his opinions as if they were fact. (Yes, I realize that is their constitutional right. Unfortunate for us.) This morning I read a blog discussing the war in Iraq and the author used a metaphor for the US and its fighting search for the evil that attacked on 9/11. He compared the US counter attack on Iraq after 9/11 "like a rogue elephant teased by a little dog, ... gone on the rampage stamping on everything that moves in the hope of killing the dog by killing everything within reach". As you might guess, it was a heated discussion instigated by a commenter offended by the term "teasing dog". Another commenter contended that a more apt description would be "a pit bull going for the jugular". That one sentence among much more about God's son was the point of disagreement for this particular "book talk". Again, I'm off topic...

Bottom line and my conclusions are that if I want to understand the book talk, I have to read The Book and not the comments of others. For some of us, that's a tough order. We can only pray that God will show mercy on our feeble minds, grant understanding of His Word and grade on a curve.