The Organ of Meaning

How is it that the Bible seems to claim this? Don’t get me wrong, I really do believe in the Bible as the Word of God.

Spurgeon writes this morning:

Be wise and attend to the obeying, and let Christ manage the providing. Come and survey your Father’s storehouse, and ask whether he will let you starve while he has laid up so great an abundance in his garner? Look at his heart of mercy; see if that can ever prove unkind! Look at his inscrutable wisdom; see if that will ever be at fault. Above all, look up to Jesus Christ your Intercessor, and ask yourself, while he pleads, can your Father deal ungraciously with you? If he remembers even sparrows, will he forget one of the least of his poor children? “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he will sustain thee. He will never suffer the righteous to be moved.”

Right. But, someone in Ethiopia in the 80s or someone else in the course of history must have been a devout follower of the Living God and still starved to death.

I do understand that these passages, the ones that can be “proven” wrong in some specific cases are not being said in a sense that it’s an unbreakable rule and way of God’s ruling of earth. It is, perhaps, the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Perhaps.

One of the things that I’ve been pondering recently is the threads of the Western Protestant tradition that, while on the whole good, are not part of the Church Universal. The main one being the assumption that the Bible is a book to be read and understood on a one-by-one personal level; really this is a generally new (renewed?) understanding to the Scriptures. I can’t help but accept that for most of history the peoples who have followed the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob and Jesus have not had personal copies of the Scriptures to read and study in a personal way – they were read on the weekend at the Temple, Synagogue or Ecclesia.

While there is no question in my mind that much, if not all, of the Christian Bible has a personal application and message, it seems doubtful to me that that is the exclusive (or even the primary) audience. Deuteronomy was read to all of the Hebrews before the entered the promised land. Josiah read the Book of the Law to all of Jerusalem when it was recovered. Nehemiah read the Law before all of the people when they were dedicating the city again. The Epistles were mostly written to communities of Christians, with a very small portion written to individual people. The primary application and intention of much of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures seems to be to the community of the followers of God at large, with the individual application to follow close behind.

I guess that individual interpretation can’t be removed from the equation though. It seems dangerous to me to leave it exclusively up to the institution of the Church, whether it be a denomination or to local leaders – we have to look no further than the history of the Roman Catholic Church or to the Judaism of Christ’s time where the ecclesiastical leaders’ claim to executive interpretation led to the abuse and ignorance of the people of the laity. Even when it’s just a local gathering, when the pastor or teacher speaks authoritatively it needs to be taken, examined and “chewed through” by the congregation so that error can be confronted by the church on the whole and so that the teacher can be corrected by those who care for him or her.

Maybe I answered my own question. God does provide for the communities who follow him at large; there are exceptions, but He still doesn’t do anything capriciously and fully owns our sorrows and our pain when He allows them to occur.