"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and with all thy strength and with all thy mind: and thy neighbour as thyself."
Luke 10:27
It occurs to me that by insisting only the first and immediate sense of scripture be allowed, that only the literal meaning might stand, and that because a certain word or phrase or understanding was not used in scripture explicitly, it is invalid, is to say that our understanding of scripture encompasses and actually surpasses everything it has to say.
We are then saying that scripture is everything that God is not.
If you really love something, you want to know its very depths, you want to know it with every fibre of your being, you want to know it with every faculty at your command.
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The Catholic and Orthodox believe that Scripture is not the dead record of some distant historical event; that its content is more than ink on paper; that Scripture is a Sacrament, a form of the Body of Christ; Scripture is that rainment which, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, shone forth atop Mount Tabor in the Transfiguration ...
... it is not the record of a revelation, it is itself a mode of revelation ...
... in the Christian contemplative tradition the reading of Scripture is, in a real and immediate sense, an interview with Christ ...
... and anyone who thinks nothing more can be had from it, or that our human whit surpasses it, (or, the most ludicrous notion of the 20th century, that the whole thing is some concoction, a conspiracy), fails utterly to comprehend the depth and profundity of its wisdom, and more significantly, its being.
[Here I am remined of the TV Si-fi series 'Lexx' - they had a very wise rule, No4 in a set of 10: "There are no life forms more intelligent than humans, unless and until such a life form does the requisite script writing." I would say the same of Scripture - show me the person (or more unlikely, the committee) whose intellect surpasses its content (not in part, but in toto) and I might entertain the idea.]
If we but had the eyes to see, then every line, every word, would provide enough wisdom, insight and inspiration to fill the libraries of the world ten times over.
God is limitless, infinite, the source of all wisdom, and we are called to know that which we love, and love that which we know.
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In the middle of the last century a Japanese convert to Christianity returned to the Buddhist school of his youth (in a remote country region) and found the headmaster, a monk in the Zen tradition, whom he happened to know had almost no knowledge of Christianity. He recounted to him the beatitudes as recorded in Matthew. "Whoever wrote that," the master observed, "was an enlightened being. That is the essence of my whole life's work."
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In the late 1800s a group of scientists met in council and agreed there was nothing more to be discovered, there was nothing new under the sun, Dame Science had yielded up all her secrets (seriously!). When a young inventor demonstrated the phonograph, they accused him of some sleight of hand, some magician's trick, they accused him of everything, rather than accept the device for what it was.
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Thomas
Luke 10:27
It occurs to me that by insisting only the first and immediate sense of scripture be allowed, that only the literal meaning might stand, and that because a certain word or phrase or understanding was not used in scripture explicitly, it is invalid, is to say that our understanding of scripture encompasses and actually surpasses everything it has to say.
We are then saying that scripture is everything that God is not.
If you really love something, you want to know its very depths, you want to know it with every fibre of your being, you want to know it with every faculty at your command.
+++
The Catholic and Orthodox believe that Scripture is not the dead record of some distant historical event; that its content is more than ink on paper; that Scripture is a Sacrament, a form of the Body of Christ; Scripture is that rainment which, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, shone forth atop Mount Tabor in the Transfiguration ...
... it is not the record of a revelation, it is itself a mode of revelation ...
... in the Christian contemplative tradition the reading of Scripture is, in a real and immediate sense, an interview with Christ ...
... and anyone who thinks nothing more can be had from it, or that our human whit surpasses it, (or, the most ludicrous notion of the 20th century, that the whole thing is some concoction, a conspiracy), fails utterly to comprehend the depth and profundity of its wisdom, and more significantly, its being.
[Here I am remined of the TV Si-fi series 'Lexx' - they had a very wise rule, No4 in a set of 10: "There are no life forms more intelligent than humans, unless and until such a life form does the requisite script writing." I would say the same of Scripture - show me the person (or more unlikely, the committee) whose intellect surpasses its content (not in part, but in toto) and I might entertain the idea.]
If we but had the eyes to see, then every line, every word, would provide enough wisdom, insight and inspiration to fill the libraries of the world ten times over.
God is limitless, infinite, the source of all wisdom, and we are called to know that which we love, and love that which we know.
+++
In the middle of the last century a Japanese convert to Christianity returned to the Buddhist school of his youth (in a remote country region) and found the headmaster, a monk in the Zen tradition, whom he happened to know had almost no knowledge of Christianity. He recounted to him the beatitudes as recorded in Matthew. "Whoever wrote that," the master observed, "was an enlightened being. That is the essence of my whole life's work."
+++
In the late 1800s a group of scientists met in council and agreed there was nothing more to be discovered, there was nothing new under the sun, Dame Science had yielded up all her secrets (seriously!). When a young inventor demonstrated the phonograph, they accused him of some sleight of hand, some magician's trick, they accused him of everything, rather than accept the device for what it was.
+++
Thomas