Quotes about Relevance

Whether or not the Christian faith is true is now irrelevant. All that matters is that to more and more people in the modern world it no longer seems true.

The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.

Nothing in our lives is a mere insignificant detail to God.

Reading the Bible responsibly and respectfully today means learning what it meant for ancient Israelites to talk about God the way they did, and not pushing alien expectations onto texts written long ago and far away.

Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.

The first question we should ask about what we are reading is not "How does this apply to me?" Rather, it is "What is this passage saying in the context of the book I am reading, and how would it have been heard in the ancient world?

The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom—holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now.

It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance.

I mean, if we try to explain Jesus's handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible "ought" to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free association with the Bible. Or worse, we may try to find some way of taking Jesus out of his ancient Jewish world and making him look more like a suburban Protestant, an urban hipster, a tea party spokesman, and so on.

None of these modern adaptations is "in the Bible," and yet even the most committed "rulebook Bible" readers out there wind up adapting what the Bible says, because we have to—if we want that ancient text to continue to speak to us today.

And again, the genius of the laws is their ambiguity, not their clarity, for their ambiguity is the very thing that allows them to gain new life with each passing year, ensuring that past and present forever remain connected and in dialogue.

And here is the absolutely vital and life-changing take-home point for us: ancient and ambiguous laws, in order to remain relevant, needed to be adapted—which results in the diversity of the laws we see in the Old Testament.