Chapter 01 -- Word

text will go here. maybe links. pix and vid. michael p, hold your fire.

If God wanted to make Himself known, wouldn't there be easier ways to do it? Why this insistence on burning bush and parable, on mystery and bloody sacrifice? "Hi, I'm God. Let's talk." Does it have to be any more complicated than that? Why leave us talking to ourselves, never sure whose voice that is in our heads, never sure if that vibe is you or hunger? Careful what you wish for.

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A hard day's drive from anywhere the masses pay attention to, a place unfixed in the popular geography. prairie, prairie town between prairie lakes, a knot in the mostly neatly squared mesh of roads and fields, like moss in a fishing net.

she is there, writing, speaking to no one and everyone. words, abstractions doubly, from mind to hand, hand to keys, keys to wires to chip and then the split, a nothing divided neatly into endless somethings, one slim branch to the screen and her eye to confirm the track of the initial spark, the other to memory and wires and air, out myriadfold to all who would receive, not knowing whence those thought bits come. magic in every moment.

next text

next test

next tent

next tempt

she does that, toying, chewing the words, sounds in her head, sounds at various intervals throughout history channeled now to the tap-tap code of her keystrokes and all the electrons connecting her neurons and the multitudes'.

Chapter 02 -- What's Wrong

• When did the Bible become the Bible?
• What do you mean?
• Well, it wasn't written all at once, right? Old Testament—
  
• New testament. Right. 
• So there was a time when if you were a believer, you had one set of books. Then something happened, someone wrote more books, and so as a believer, you had more books.
• Well, not literally. When the Old Testament was all there was, you didn't really have a book. It was the Torah, and it was written down in places, but not as one big thick book that everybody had copies of. Torah was mostly oral tradition.
  
• But suppose I was a Jew in Palestine, 30 C.E. I know my Torah. Then comes Jesus. I follow him, and pretty soon I've got new Scripture.
  
• Yes. You're also not a Jew any more. You're a Christian.
  
• Sure, sure, my faith changes... or does it? I mean, I still believe in the same one God, right?
• Yes.
• And I'm not throwing out my old Scripture. I'm just recognizing that something just happened. Something big. God just came down and did something that we need to write down and understand to make sense of our faith.
• That's what the New Testament does, tells us how to be Christians.
  
• So we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John writing that stuff down.
• Come to seminary, and you can get into the debates about the authorship—
• But basically, you've got contemporaries of Jesus writing down the events of his life, his teachings, miracles, all the main points.
• Right. Then Paul adds his letters, and his followers.
• So new books, right and left.
• Well, again, "books" was a different concept then from now. Paul's work is letters. There was no mass printing.
• Sure. But we have these guys writing new... books. How do they know when to stop?
• The disciples?
• Everybody. Every Christian. I mean, they didn't have an organized team or project at the start to write down everything important about Jesus, did they? Did someone say, "Let's write a Bible?"
• No, not at first. There was a concerted effort to write things down. Christ's followers were building a new faith. They needed to define themselves and explain how they were different from the Jews. As the movement picked up steam, the leaders of the movement had an interest in making sure Christianity stayed coherent and cohesive. The efforts of the Christians put pressure on the Jews to do something similar.
  
• The Jews didn't add anything, though.
• No, they just knocked into shape what they had, got everyone on the same page.
• The Christians added stuff.
• From the perspective of the Jews and where they were two generations previous, yes. By the end of the first century, they had that body of writings that eventually got boiled down to the New Testament.
• When was that?
• 400s. Council of Nicea.
  
• And then done, no more new Scripture, right?
• Right. The church fathers said we had all we needed. Those books were what we needed to define and defend Christianity.
• So no more was needed? How did they know?
• That's kind of like asking me how they knew those Scriptures were the Word of God.  It's almost one of those "If you have to ask..." kind of questions. I could say "They just knew."
• But that's a terrible answer.
• [laughing] Not for a lot of people I know. But I agree. And there's more to it. There is a completeness to what happened and what the New Testament described. Think about what Jesus said on the cross: "It is finished." He did work that had to be done to complete God's plan, and it was all that needed to be done.
  
• But the New Testament doesn't end on the cross. We still get Acts and Romans and all that, the aftermath, Paul telling us what it all meant. How did they know when they had explained Christ's coming and works and crucifixion enough?
• The Church fathers did need to keep the new faith a coherent body of thinking. if you put every scrap written by every Christian into Scripture, you'd have so many conflicting views to sift through, the Church couldn't hold together. There was also a sense that they didn't need anything else. It's like....
• Like what?
• I was going to say it's like the Constitution, how there was so much the Founding Fathers could have thrown in, but they had to keep it manageable.
• But we've amended the Constitution.
• Right. That's why I stopped. The analogy doesn't work.
• Doesn't it? That's what I'm wondering about.
• Could there be amendments to the New Testament?
• Exactly.
• No.
  
• No? That quickly? You're that certain?
• Yes. The idea is that all you need to understand is right there in Jesus's life. He's the center... or the end point, pick your geometry. There's nothing else we do, nothing else we write, that changes that central fact of our existence as children of God.
  
• But two thousand years have gone by. The world has changed. We have the Word of God in places that Jesus didn't know existed.
• Well, Jesus would have known—
• O.K., places like right here that Paul and the other writers of the New Testament didn't know about, or the bishops after them. Cultures totally different from the cultures Paul was writing to. Couldn't there be events or cultural realities that existing Scripture just doesn't cover? Can a person trying to apply Christianity to the modern world, the Internet, cell-phone, post-modern, post-9/11 world, really find every answer he needs in Scriptures written two thousand years ago in provinces of a pre-industrial empire?
• That is a challenge Christians face. But we believe the story of Christ's coming is complete. He doesn't have to come and sacrifice himself every time the Bible reaches a new country, or every time someone invents some new technology.
• But what if... suppose some truly earth-shaking historical event took place. Suppose there were some new Holocaust: Christians are wiped off the face of the earth, only a few remain. Is that just Revelation carried out—
• Definitely not that. Remember, Revelation is not fortune-telling. It's allegory, a tale of the Roman empire. There's no Biblicall outline for some end-time.
  
• But couldn't a huge historical event like that require some explanation for Christians, something to explain to them what their faith means in that radically different world?
  
• We could find what we need in the stories we have.
  
• Wow. That takes a lot of faith in the power of metaphor, doesn't it?
• Interesting way to put it. Metaphor, deep textual analysis... yes, I guess we Christians must rely on that literary analysis. But that doesn't mean it can't happen. And it doesn't mean the text we have is incomplete.
  

Where

So why are you here?

To do God's will.

No, no. Why are you here?

Here? This house? this town?

Yes.

Does here matter? Can't I perform God's work anywhere?

You tell me that God's work required that you take this form, this body. If the flesh matters, so does the space, the physical location.

You're paying attention. Good.

Now why this place? Why not the center of the empire?

Jesus didn't preach in Rome. He spent a lot of his time in the backcountry.

But the big show was in Jerusalem, a historical center. Are we going on a trip?

Maybe we're in the new Jerusalem.

Are we?

[long pause] I can do what must be done here.

But don't you have to reach people? How can you do that in the middle of nowhere?

You invent these tools that should bring you closer to understanding what I mean about time and space being porous and flexible, but you still don't get it. This is so much about the word, and for that... well, what more do I need than a keyboard and a good Internet connection?

And that's enough? Words on a screen?

I am the Word. [he flinches, walks away] Is something wrong?

[not looking at her] I don't know why you scare me.

[reworking her answer] Words serve their purpose. Jesus did his work in the flesh, but even God in flesh can only touch so many lives. How many people actually knew Jesus? How many know me? I could live in New York City or Beijing, or I could have a million "friends" on Facebook, but I still wouldn't really know any more people than I do here. I can walk to and talk to and look in the eye of only so many people each day. Imagine me speaking to a hundred thousand people in a stadium. That still is not human interaction. I am mediated there: yards and yards of space, electric speakers instead of my voice, electric lights instead of my face, anyone farther than the first row filling in the gaps with what they want to see and feel. And then I am mediated by memory, as most of those people are even that close to me only that once, and I move on to the next city, the next stadium. We live and interact in the full context of our bodies and our places, seeing each other time and time again, sharing the same days and clouds and streets. In all that will come, I still touch you more now—I do more of what needs to be done now.

And that matters?

 

More than anything. You, and Kari next door, and Clara and Jack, and the Almazar brothers, and the church council. Everyone I see, everyone who sees me here not just as a name or an image online but as that strange woman in the grocery store—they matter. The Internet could disappear tomorrow, and I could still do all the work the world needs right here.

But I don't get it. You talk about changing the church, changing the world.

I don't talk about that. I talk about doing the work that must be done. You talk about the worldly changes that work will cause.

But those changes—

Gravy. Sideshow.

Try history.

Does history matter? If I run a race today, and I win, does tomorrow's weather or stock market change the record books?

Don't you have to consider the consequences of your actions?

I do. Every day. I'm ready for them.