Free Kindle download of historic book of daily devotions – Sept. 1-15 – Read article http://ow.ly/6iQUu – view video – http://ow.ly/6iQXZ

Thanks Chipotle and Willie! Check it out — Back to the Start http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMfSGt6rHos&feature=share via @youtube

Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith: http://nyti.ms/n2053V

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Let me speak some plain truths.
“The aim of the Methodist movement as conceived by John Wesley was not to generate a prosperous and successful denomination, or even several of them,” Dr. Ted Jennings wrote in his book Good News to the Poor: John Wesley’s Evangelical Economics, “but ‘to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land’… The success or failure of this project depended not on increase in numbers and influence, but on an increase in faithfulness … By Wesley’s own standard, the Methodist movement must be reckoned a failure.
Read more… http://bit.ly/qjm0A4

By David Lose –
Re-posted from the Huffington Post

Cards on the table: 1) I read the Bible — not as much as I should, I’m sure, but still pretty regularly. Moreover, I get paid to talk about the Bible with folks all across the country and have written a popular book to help people read the Bible with more confidence and enjoyment. So, you could say, I’m a pretty big fan of the good book. 2) I was a little shocked to discover that three in ten Americans read the Bible literally. That is, about a third of the American populace takes everything the Bible says at face value, reading as they would a history or science textbook. 3) I don’t read the Bible this way, and can’t imagine doing so.

1) Nowhere does the Bible claim to be inerrant.

That’s right. At no place in its more than 30,000 verses does the Bible claim that it is factually accurate in terms of history, science, geography and all other matters (the technical definition of inerrancy). “Inerrant” itself is not a word found in the Bible or even known to Christian theologians for most of history. Rather, the word was coined in the middle of the 19th century as a defensive counter measure to the increased popularity of reading the Bible as one would other historical documents and the discovery of manifold internal inconsistencies and external inaccuracies.

The signature verse most literalists point to is 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” But one can confess that Scripture is inspired by God without resorting to claims that it contains no factual errors. We normally use the language of inspiration in just this way, describing a painting, a performance of Chopin, or even a good lecture as inspired. What binds the various and sundry texts found in the Bible together may be precisely that they are all inspired by the authors’ experience of the living God. There is no hint that the authors of the Bible imagined that what they were writing was somehow supernaturally guaranteed to be factually accurate. Rather, biblical authors wrote in order to be persuasive, hoping that by reading their witness you would come to believe as they did (see John 20:30-31).

2) Reading the Bible literally distorts its witness.

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Jerusalem Temple in the days immediately preceding his crucifixion. In the Gospel of John, he does this near the beginning of his ministry, two years before his death. Similarly, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the day Jesus is crucified is named as the Passover, while in John it is the Day of Preparation; that is, the day before Passover. Inconsistencies like this are part of what undermines claims to inerrancy of not just the gospels but also many other books in the Bible.

But if the primary intention of the biblical authors was not to record history — in the post-Enlightenment sense we take for granted today — but instead to confess faith, then these differences are not troubling inconsistencies to be reconciled but rather helpful clues to understanding the confession of the author. So rather than ask who got it right, we might instead wonder why John describes these events differently than the other Evangelists. As it turns out, both of these examples stem from John’s theological claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb. For this reason, once he begins his ministry there is no need for Temple sacrifice, and he is crucified on the same day — indeed, at the exact hour — at which the Passover lambs were sacrificed on the Day of Preparation.

You can attempt to reconcile these and other discrepancies in the biblical witness, of course, and literalists have published books almost as long as the Bible attempting to do just that. In the case of the different timeframes for the cleansing of the Temple, for instance, one might suggest that Jesus did this twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and then again, for good measure, two years later. But far from “rescuing” the gospels, such an effort distorts their distinct confession of faith by rendering an account of Jesus’ life that none of the canonical accounts offers.

3) Most Christians across history have not read the Bible literally.

We tend to think of anything that is labeled “conservative” as being older and more traditional. Oddly enough, however, the doctrine of inerrancy that literalists aim to conserve is only about a century and a half old. Not only did many of the Christian Church’s brightest theologians not subscribe to anything like inerrancy, many adamantly opposed such a notion. For instance, St. Augustine — rarely described as a liberal — lived for many years at the margins of the church. An impediment to his conversation was precisely the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale. It was not until Ambrose, bishop of Milan, introduced Augustine to allegorical interpretation — that is, that stories can point metaphorically to spiritual realities rather than historical facts — that Augustine could contemplate taking the Bible (and those who read it!) seriously.

The point isn’t that pre-modern Christians approached the Bible with the same historically conscious skepticism of the Bible’s factual and scientific veracity that modern interpreters possess. Earlier Christians — along with almost everyone else who lived prior to the advent of modernity — simply didn’t imagine that for something to be true it had to be factually accurate, a concern only advanced after the Enlightenment. Hence, four gospels that diverged at different points, far from troubling earlier Christians, was instead seen as a faithful and fitting recognition that God’s truth as revealed in Jesus was too large to be contained by only one perspective. Flattening the biblical witness to conform to a reductionist understanding of truth only limits the power of Scripture. As Karl Barth, arguably the twentieth century’s greatest theologian, once said, “I take the Bible too seriously to read it literally.”

4) Reading the Bible literally undermines a chief confession of the Bible about God.

Read the Bible even for a little while and you’ll soon realize that most of the major characters are, shall we say, less than ideal. Abraham passes his wife off as his sister — twice! — in order to save his skin. Moses is a murderer. David sleeps around. Peter denies Jesus three times. Whatever their accomplishments, most of the “heroes of the faith” are complicated persons with feet of clay. And that’s the point: the God of the Bible regularly uses ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.

Why, then, treat the Bible itself differently? Rather than imagine that the Bible was also written by ordinary, fallible people, inerrantists have made the Bible an other-wordly, supernatural document that runs contrary to the biblical affirmation that God chooses ordinary vessels — “jars of clay,” the Apostle Paul calls them — to bear an extraordinary message. In fact, literalists unwittingly ascribe to the Bible the status of being “fully human and fully divine” that is normally reserved only for Jesus.

So why, then, would so many people read the Bible literally? Perhaps that’s the subject for another post. For now, I’d be interested in your experience with the Bible and sense of its nature and authority.

My selected excerpts from a powerful speech by one my personal heroes…

What else have we learned? That we are not alone in this world. God alone is alone. Human beings are not. We are here to be together with others, and I insist on the others — which means, in some places, in some groups, they are suspicious of the other. Don’t. I see the otherness of the other, which appeals to me. In fact it is the otherness of the other that makes me who I am. I am always to learn from the other. And the other is, to me, not an enemy, but a companion, an ally, and of course, in some cases of grace, a friend. So the other is never to be rejected, and surely not humiliated.

What else? I quote from the Bible, I continue, because after all that is my study — that’s my upbringing. The greatest commandment, to me, in the Bible is not the Ten Commandments. First of all, it’s too difficult to observe. Second, we all pretend to observe them. My commandment is, “Thou shall not stand idly by.” Which means when you witness an injustice, don’t stand idly by. When you hear of a person or a group being persecuted, do not stand idly by. When there is something wrong in the community around you — or far way — do not stand idly by. You must intervene. You must interfere. And that is actually the motto of human rights. Human rights has become a kind of secular religion today. And I applaud it — I am part of it. And therefore wherever something happens, I try to be there as a witness.

———–

What do we know now? A new trend is hanging upon us, and the name is fanaticism. We must do whatever we can to, first of all, unmask. Second, to denounce. And, of course, to oppose fanaticism wherever it is. What is fanaticism? Perversion. You can take a beautiful idea — like religion in the Middle Ages — but fanaticism can turn it into something which is anti-human because a group of human beings decide that they know who is worthy of life, who is worthy of redemption.

————

Now, a story. A man is lost in the forest. And he tries to find the exit and fails. It takes him hours in night and day, and he’s still lost in the forest. On the third day, he notices that someone else is in the forest. He runs to him and he says, “Ah! I’m so glad to meet you. Show me the way out.” And he said, “I am like you — I am lost in the forest. One thing I can tell you: You see that road there? Don’t go there. I have just come from there.”

I belong to a generation that tells you that. Where you now can start your life, and you’ve of course entered a lot of roads, cities, maybe new universities, and remember, there is something that you must remember: Don’t go where I come from.

————

I want you to know, with all that I have gone through in life: I still have faith in humanity. I still have faith in humanity. I have faith in language, although language was perverted by the enemy. I have faith in God, although I quarrel with Him a lot of time. I don’t know whether he feels upset or not, but I do. Why? Because I don’t want to break the chain that links me to my parents and grandparents and theirs, and theirs, and theirs.

And furthermore, I believe that the human being — any human being of any community, any origin, any color — a human being is eternal. Any human being is a challenge. Any human being is worthy of my attention, of my love occasionally. And therefore I say it to you: When you are now going into a world which is hounded, obsessed with so much violence, often so much despair — when you enter this world and you say the world is not good today, good! Correct it! That’s what you have learned here for four years from your great teachers. Go there, and tell them what you remember. Tell them that the nobility of the human being cannot be denied.

I’m sure you have learned French literature. I’m sure you have learned about Albert Camus, the great philosopher and novelist. In his famous novel, The Plague, at the end Dr. Rieux, who was the main character of the novel, sees a devastated city, thousands and thousands of victims from the plague. And this doctor at the end says, it’s true, all that is true.

But nevertheless, I believe, he said, there is more in any human being to celebrate than to denigrate. I repeat: There is more in any human being to celebrate than to denigrate.

Let’s celebrate. Thank you.

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To view a video of Wiesel’s Commencement address at Washington University in St. Louis, visit youtube.com/watch?v=votSq2u7jFA.