Unsettled Earth

¹⁷ “See, I will create
   new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered,
   nor will they come to mind.
¹⁸ But be glad and rejoice forever
   in what I will create,
for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight
   and its people a joy.
¹⁹ I will rejoice over Jerusalem
   and take delight in my people;
the sound of weeping and of crying
   will be heard in it no more.

 ²⁰ “Never again will there be in it
   an infant who lives but a few days,
   or an old man who does not live out his years;
the one who dies at a hundred
   will be thought a mere child;
the one who fails to reach a hundred
   will be considered accursed.
²¹ They will build houses and dwell in them;
   they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
²² No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
   or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
   so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
   the work of their hands.
²³ They will not labor in vain,
   nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the LORD,
   they and their descendants with them.
²⁴ Before they call I will answer;
   while they are still speaking I will hear.
²⁵ The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
   and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
   and dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
   on all my holy mountain,”
            says the LORD.

So I thought that I would share this passage and reflect on it a little. This passage has reoccured so many times this semester, so I thought that it warranted some of my blog time.

How you read this passage will be a great indicator of how you read the Bible, but more importantly what your vision of the end will be. Something which has been pounded into my head this year is that the goal or purpose that we concieve of as Christians greatly dictates how we do everything else. If affects how we read the bible, how we live our lives on this planet, and how we treat other people.

If your ultimate goal is simply to get yourself that nice green-card into heaven, you will naturally interpret all the things in the bible as having to do with heaven and subsequently hell. Every positive command keeps you in heaven, every negative one sends you to hell. Well someone with this lens is going to have a lot of trouble with this passage. This is clearly a vision of the end, but it seems to be nothing like what a lot of Christians are preaching.

Isaiah 65 paints a picture of a future world where God has renewed both heaven and earth. It paints a picture of a city where God dwells with his people, and they do a lot more earthly things than we like to admit. They plant crops and build houses.

Now that I realize I’m going all over the place I’ll make my point. Perhaps, dear readers, the Bible is not a “how to” book on getting to heaven. Isaiah 65 points out a clear cultural understanding of the ancient Israelites, that to be blessed by God meant to be blessed while alive, not in some utopian future in the clouds with harps. The entire Bible has so much to say about what we need to be doing on a day-to-day basis in order to help this world along; in order to lead this world to it’s renewal, and it will speak that into your life if you remove your heaven and hell goggles and try to understand what it’s actually talking about.

For more cool info on this subject, check out this youtube video by N.T. Wright.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z50Jv-PXYb4

“For many people, Christians in particular, the New Testament is a resource for spiritual and moral guidance through life. Discussions should enhance, rather than detract from that endeavour. A scholarly approach to reading sacred texts is often seen as threatening to a life of faith. And there is some validity to that perception. Biblical scholarship, by definition, inquires into matters of history, culture, religion, ideology, literature, etc. in relation to the various documents of the NT, without predetermining the outcome of the inquiry. As a result, some of the findings come into conflict with long-standing, traditional ways of reading the same texts.” - George Shillington (The New Testament in Context)

No Text Is An Island, to borrow a phrase from Shillington. True biblical scholarship does not read the Bible with a presupposed theology in mind. In the intro to his book he says that a completely irreligious person comes into biblical scholarship with a much easier task. If that irreligious person does good hermenutical work, he will be able to come to more objective understandings of the Bible and theology than any Christian. It is high time that we begin our journey towards this. Many theological discussions in my experience are simply conflicts of personal taste. A Calvinist argues Calvinism because they need assurance, an Arminanist argues Arminianism because they want responsibility. So then each person reads the Bible in that way, picking out the verses and phrases which give them that emotion. A responsible, biblical scholar will leave their feelings at the door, and hermeutically identify what the bible as a whole says, and not conform it to a presupposed theology.

I have heard it said, “I just want to read my Bible,” when confronted about context and proper scholarship. I’m afraid, dear reader, that it is impossible to “just read” your Bible. If you “just read” your Bible, you will read your own presuppositions into the text and come away with an incorrect understanding. You are reading some of the oldest texts in human history. If you think that you can just jump 2000 years of culture and history and 100% understand the Bible, you are mistaken.

The Bible is not God.  The Bible is not a mystical book which exists outside of time and is meant to be read literally, and in every age it will have something new to reveal. It is the ancient document. Each seperate document within the Bible was written specifically, in time. It is not tracendent, it is not outside of the clutches of human writing, culture, literature, history, theology, ideology. However, given the correct scholarship, one can understand the Bible in it’s original context, (aka. what it meant back then) and then do a good job of applying it across the 2000 year gap to today.

I challenge anyone who reads this to read through their Bible afresh. Leave what you think you know about the Bible, and see what it actually has to say.