We can't treat the Bible with kid gloves. We really need to wrestle with the issues, because our faith depends on it.

literature enlarges our world of experience to include both more of the physical world and things not yet imagined, giving the "actual world" a "new dimension of depth" (Lewis, Of Other Worlds 29). This makes it possible for literature to strip Christian doctrines of their "stained glass" associations and make them appear in their "real potency" (37), a possibility Lewis himself realized in the Narnia series and the space trilogy.

Western culture generally, as well as the Christian subculture specifically, has had an unwarranted tendency to think that abstract ideas and facts are the only valid type of knowledge that we possess. Literature challenges that bias, and so does the Bible. The Bible is not a theological outline with proof texts attached. It is an anthology of literature.

That is why we not only learn from literature but enjoy it: it delights as it teaches. And it conveys its kind of truth through the creation of concrete images which incarnate or embody ideas which would otherwise remain abstract and nebulous.

Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction.

He was like a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he was pulling it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlong speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to.

Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called 'un-inspired' literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages — enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.

All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass. At last he said, "You're travelling the wrong way," and shut up the window and went away.

I don't much care where-" "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," "so long as I get somewhere," "Oh, you're sure to do that, if you only walk long enough"/ "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."/ Child of the pure unclouded brow And dreaming eyes of wonder! The love-gift of a fairy-tale. ?Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass?

What I heard and saw was a charge to declare his Holy Word in all the wisdom of its counsel and wonder of its strength. It was an invitation to remake the human language in the image if the divine rather than strip the Word of God of its divinity to make it human.

We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.

The vigor of our spiritual life will be in exact proportion to the place held by the Bible in our life and thoughts.