In his sermon this past Sunday at Pasadena Covenant Church, Leslie Allen made an observation that American culture doesn’t like fear and the Church has assimilated to this view. Thus, we make God the personification of niceness. We dismiss whole sections of the Bible because they deal with the reality of fear in our lives in ways that do not comfort us.

The statement that we avoid parts of the Bible got me thinking about what I tend to avoid in the Bible and I realized I’m a pretty reactionary reader. Largely, I react against interpretations I used to hold but don’t hold now, heated debates I don’t want to enter, or different camps with whom I disagree who have made these texts central to their identities. Our Bible study is going through Genesis and this week we read Genesis 19, or the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. We let the story amaze us with its richness and sadness. We realized many of the arguments and counterarguments we hear regarding the text do not do justice to the narrative. But before Sunday night, I would have easily said that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was a text I would rather avoid—I called it a landmine—because of the way I have heard some preachers use it in a, well, hellfire and brimstone manner.

What other texts do I avoid? I’ve avoided Genesis 1-2 because I’m tired of the creationism/evolution debate. I’ve abdicated Revelation to the Left Behind and Hal Lindsey eschatologies. I read The Late, Great Planet Earth in high school and believed its interpretation of Scripture and history for a few months, but I now reject it. I skip over parts of 1 Corinthians because of the claims some charismatic brothers and sisters have staked. I grow nervous when I hear people preaching on giving and tithing or divine blessing because of the crap (and I do mean crap) coming from the prosperity gospel preachers.

Look at the Bible I’m left with if I follow this reactionary reading program. The TTRV (Tyler’s Truncated Reactionary Version) says little about God’s creative activities, interaction with unjust societies, expectations of what we are to do with our resources and money, how the Holy Spirit empowers the Church, how God cares and blesses, or that there is an ultimate purpose to history.

I would love to be able to take an appreciative approach to many of the interpretations of Scripture that make me bristle. Most days I say why bother and then go read the texts that haven’t been tainted for me. Some days I feel like proclaiming as Bono does at the opening of “Helter Skelter” on the album Rattle and Hum, “This song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles; we’re stealing it back.”

The belief that we have mastered certain texts so that we think there is nothing new to learn from them, is perhaps just as harmful, but that is for another post.

Disclaimer: This is not a post about Plato and his cave or the contemporary versions of that allegory found in C. S. Lewis’ works or The Matrix trilogy, so relax. Nor is this about MTV’s long-running reality series.

Having spent the majority of my life in school—I finished the 19th grade in December – I have heard the common refrain that I would soon find out what it would be like in the “real world.” I also heard a lot of talk about the real world when I worked at a Christian summer camp. The real world, as I understood the term, was the one where had the responsibilities of families, bills, etc. In the real world, people are faced with concrete challenges. There is a sense that the real world is where most of the people spend most of their time.

The term the real world has always struck me as odd and condescending. First it is odd for no one has told me the boundaries of the real world. For example, the academy is not the real world presumably because it is a place of theory and research that is not ruled by the capitalistic theories that determine much of our society. That, and fewer people go to college or teach in college than work outside the university. But just because few people work in a setting doesn’t mean that their experience is not as important as others’ work. For example, relatively few people work in investment banking and yet we consider the realm of finance the real world whereas the realm of academics is not.

Second, I find the term condescending because it belittles peoples’ experience. What is it that we experience in our lives that isn’t real? Now everything I experienced in school or camp may not be applicable in the vineyards in Selma, California, but at the same time, not all the skills one gains harvesting raisins is applicable in the classroom. One realm is not categorically more real than the other. The danger as I see it is when we universalize our experience and assume that it is the totality of reality for everyone. My experience and knowledge is reality for me, but when I universalize my experience and deem it exclusively real, I run the risk of invalidating other experiences because they do not fit into my understanding of what is real. I’m not arguing for relativizing ethoses, but describing the fact that there is a plurality of experience.

For us living in the West, how can we say we live in the real world when our wealth is far beyond what the majority of the world experiences (see the Global Rich List to calculate your wealth relative to the rest of the world)? Does the fact that we experience a level of comfort foreign to the majority of the people on the globe mean our experience is less real? Perhaps, but I prefer not to speak about the “real world.” Instead, I prefer the term found in the film Fight Club: “Who you were in Fight Club was not who you were in the rest of the world.” (Emphasis added.)

To what degree can we speak of the Bible having a trajectory? A trajectory within the Bible would mean that we take the teachings of the Bible beyond mere application of principles in our context and also look at the direction the Bible points us in and continue on that path. Practically speaking, it is the debate of whether a biblical trajectory exists that is behind many debates within the church including the ordination of women and other issues.

It seems to me that all of Christian theology has a trajectory. All history is moving toward the eschaton—the day when God’s kingdom will be fully realized on Earth. Jesus points us to God’s present and coming kingdom as our standard for our worship, relationships, and patterns of behavior. Taking the Lord’s Prayer (Mt 6.9-13) as a heuristic, we can see that Jesus directs our focus and longing to the perfection that will come when God’s reign is fully envisioned (“Your kingdom come”), but we are also implored to live now as if that reign is a total reality (“As we forgive our debtors”). Paul also mentions that because of Jesus’ life and work on the cross, the old measures of righteousness and membership in God’s people no longer hold (e.g., Gal 3.21-29). Therefore, I believe we can see a trajectory within Scripture.

I have wanted to become a more succinct writer—verbosity is a cancer in any form of writing. Some authors can lull the audience in with sweet verbage, but in the end, if the beautiful language doesn’t take the reader somewhere, it’s all worthless. Thus, I have decided to begin something of a discipline: trying to write meaningful posts that are around 500 words, more or less. After three years of graduate studies, 500 words feels like the beginning of an introduction. Still, I am a firm believer that something worthwhile can be addressed and argued in a short space. One may not be as exhaustive as if they were writing a full dissertation, but good authors should be able to make their points quickly if the form demands it. Too often, I think we like the sound of our own voices.

This week, I tried my hand at the new discipline with the post “The Language of Rights and Responsibilities.” From time to time, I will try to address other topics using 500 words or less. This venture is as much about the 500 word format as it is about the topics themselves. I welcome peoples’ input as to how successful these posts are. Sometimes I’m sure I’ll bite off more than I can chew, but that’s part of the learning process. If anyone else wants to join me in this venture on their blogs, feel welcome. It might be fun. Who knows? We might become better writers. So, let’s cut the fat.

During the past few months I found myself in several discussions regarding the use of rights language and responsibility language. Most of these discussions involved someone arguing that we should move beyond rights language to responsibility language. Rights imply something inherent to an individual or group (e.g., the individual’s right to liberty and a nation’s right to govern itself within its borders). Responsibilities also refer to individuals and groups, but in our common use of the term, it is a person’s role that determines his or her responsibilities. Parents are responsible for their children’s upbringing. Police are responsible for maintaining the safety of the general population of a city. We do not tend to think of people being born with unalienable responsibilities.