What is in Kelvin's Head?

Where to get started with the Bible

30/06/2014

Reading the Bible isn’t optional for Christians – it is part of what makes us who we are. However, there’s no doubt that some people find it daunting and don’t know where to start.

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend starting at the beginning and working through to the end. It starts OK with some interesting and apparently familiar stories about creation and a load of stories about Abraham but soon veers off into purity codes and punishments and what can seem like interminable records of who gave birth to whom.

Better to begin somewhere else.

Start with one of the Gospels

I’d suggest starting with one of the gospel books – that means one of the following books – Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.

(By the way, I recommend the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Get one of the ones with the Apocrypha and look for one with British rather than American spellings if that matters to you).

You’ve got the idea that the Bible is really a library of books written by different people at different times and in different places, right? Well the gospels are four different accounts of the life of Jesus told by different writers for different audiences. If you look carefully you’ll see that there are what appear to be discrepancies between them but essentially they all clearly tell you about the life and death of a man who told stories, healed people and befriended an unlikely crew before being killed in Jerusalem. These books were all written after Jesus’s death and crucially after those who knew him best spread the story that death had not been the end of Jesus but that in some way they were still encountering him in a way which changed the world.

If you want a short one to start with I’d suggest Mark – just 16 rushing chapters where we find Jesus portrayed as a healing holy man. Note how the action flows from the desert to the city. Note also that there’s nothing much about Jesus’s birth in this one. It is all about his life and teaching. If you want to find the Christmas stories you need to look in Matthew’s gospel for the story of the Magi (aka the Wise Men) from the East or in Luke’s gospel for most of the stuff about Mary, Joseph and Bethlehem. Matthew was trying to relate Jesus’s life to a community who were working out the relationship between their Jewishness and the rest of the world which is perhaps why he presents the Magi coming from outside the holy land to worship at the crib. Luke, traditionally thought of as a doctor has more about Jesus’s relationships with women and the amazing song of Mary that teaches us that spirituality and justice are inherrently bound together.

John’s gospel, meanwhile was written after the others and the big theme is to try to explain what it all means rather than simply to tell a story. Symbols are hugely significant to John and whoever wrote it (no, we don’t really know) plays around with time in order to make his point.

All human life is found in the Psalms

After reading one of the gospels, I’d suggest that someone heads over into the Psalms and starts to dip in and out. All human life is there. These are spiritual songs which form a collection of spiritual writing which goes from anger to joy, from despair to compassion. Most people already know Psalm 23 because of the comfort that it has brought through many centuries to those being bereaved. But check out Psalm 121 for inspiration, Psalm 139 for a meditation on what it means to be human and the final psalms at the end of the book for fabulous images of praise and worship.

People still read the psalms as a bedrock for prayer and they form the core of Daily Prayer in just about any Christian tradition. We sing them every week on a Sunday at St Mary’s and recite them every other day at Morning Prayer.

Maybe now it is time for Genesis and a bit of Job

Remember the first book of the Bible that we glossed over at the beginning – well maybe it is time to give it a go now. Start with the creation stories at the beginning and remind yourself that there’s two quite different accounts in the first two chapters. They are obviously not worth reading if you think that they are either a replacement for a scientific understanding of the world and nor if you think they are irrelevant now we have a scientific understanding of the world. They are a good deal more subtle than that – they are attempts to prompt reflection about the way humans experience the world. It is the big – “what are we doing here?” question turned into stories and pictures. These texts still provoke a response even now.

Whilst we are on the “What are we doing here?” question, you might like to take a leap into the book of Job – a story of someone who is trying to work out precisely that. He does what he thinks is right in the world and ends up leading a miserable life. A bunch of friends come along who say, “well, that sucks, God’s been horrible to you” and from somewhere inside himself, Job seems to conclude that this is just the way it is and that God is to be blessed and praised anyway. It is a good one for psychologists (amateur or otherwise) is Job.

Back in Genesis, you’ll find the sagas of Abraham and of Joseph taking up a good deal of the space. Worth a go, not least as they start to establish the theme that God blesses unlikely people. (Abraham sells off his wife to save his own skin not once but twice and you already know the story and the songs from the Joseph stuff from a certain musical).

A bit of prophecy now – Isaiah but start in the middle

Take a leap into the prophets now by reading a few chapters from the book of Isaiah. But don’t start at the beginning, start at chapter 40. Isaiah was written by at least two people at different times. Pick it up in the middle where there’s this soaring and wonderful prose which will again sound familiar but this time it is Handel who is giving you the tunes to hum over as you read rather than Andrew Lloyd Webber – we are in Messiah territory here.

Read some tricky stuff

Oh, don’t neglect the tricky stuff. You know fine well that this was written a long time ago and that our culture and society has moved on now, right? Well, it is still worth reading about Sodom and Gomorrah and that pesky verse in Leviticus 18 about men not lying with men and having a think about the sexual morality of godly people has changed and is still changing. Nowadays, we tend to think of the Sodom stuff as being about the crime of being inhospitable rather than an injunction against faithful, stable gay lives. Similarly, you want to read a few verses either side of the Leviticus verse and you’ll find that eating shellfish is condemned with as much ferocity as gay sex. The day an evangelical church launches a campaign against prawn cocktails is a day to take them more seriously in wanting to limit the human rights of gay people today.

Don’t miss the stuff about women and men either. We’ve already encountered some of it in the second chapter of Genesis but you want to take a look at St Paul’s stuff about women being quiet in church (1 Corinthians 14) and keeping their heads covered (1 Corinthians 11). Again, we have to see this in its historical context and murmur to ourselves that even in its historical context it was wrong, it kept women silenced and recognise that not everything in religion is good.

But don’t miss the best bits of Paul

Oh heavens, right in the middle of all that stuff about women you get one of the best bits of St Paul’s writings – 1 Corinthians 13. It is such a fabulous celebration of love that it still gets read frequently (and often very badly) at weddings.

Love is patient and love is kind, but if you want something a bit erotic you need to dip back into the Hebrew scriptures and read the sexy Song of Songs.

And end up with Revelation

The last book of the Bible is the Revelation of St John. It is a wacky read at first sight. You’ll find yourself asking “what was he on?” Is this drug induced writing or something that comes from a mystical state. Whatever it is, you find, amidst some rather gory stuff which is probably an allegory of how people thought the world was ending at the time it was written, some glorious images of what heaven is like – fabulous food, music and sex are the basic images of heaven that run through a lot of biblical thinking.

Then start reading it systematically

Once you’ve got a basic idea of what’s in it, reading a few short passages a day is a good idea.

Any member of the clergy in any church in any part of the world is delighted when someone asks for suggestions on how to read the Bible. Go on, if you are short of ideas yourself, make their day complete.

bible, getting started, reading the Bible

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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