A New Kind of Christian Part 4 - Faith Foundations

At one point, McLaren compares faith not to a building with a foundation, but to a spider web with many anchor points. These anchors may be spiritual experiences, exemplary people we have come to trust, or guidance and teaching from a variety of sources. The great thing about a web is that it is both flexible and resilient. It can be repaired when damaged. It serves various functions.

And the Bible is also an anchor point in this web of faith. Though many people call the Bible the foundation, in reality, Jesus is the foundation, not the Bible. To be more specific, every passage from the Bible that has affected your life could be seen as not just an anchor point, but part of every thread on the web.

And when it comes to the interpretation of the Word, there are problems on both sides of the spectrum:

Conservatives treat the Bible as if it were a modern history book, encyclopedia or law code. But those sorts of categories were rudimentary at best, and you can’t discount the clear difference in what was written then and what is written now.

Liberals, though they acknowledge that the Bible is different from modern texts, still seem to judge it by modern standards. If something in the Bible doesn’t fit in with a Western mindset (objectivity, science, democracy, individualism, etc.) then it is dismissed as primitive or irrelevant.

McLaren suggests a third approach. Instead of approaching the Bible with our modern assumptions and expectations, we approach it more as humble seekers trying to learn whatever we can as we fuel our sincere desire to live for God and do what He wants. In other words, instead of reading the Bible, let the Bible read us. This approach is less aggressive but can be even more energetic and passionate. What if we honestly listened to the story to allow it to speak to us, not coming with our questions that we expect God to answer, but trusting God to use it to pose questions to us?