The Bible Experience

When I first heard of this I was pretty cynical. There's something sinister about marketing a product by referring to it as 'God breathed'. Not that God can't use things like this, but the line between God's work and human manipulation of it is pretty thin.

Having said that, I was impressed with this video clip presentation. The audio Bible cast is impressive and I found the crucifixion clip very moving. Check it out (the trailer is ten minutes long).

You can listen to excerpts for free on the right hand of the website here. What I find particularly interesting is the juxtaposition of Old Testament prophecies and their New Testament fulfilment. Although straight forward narratives such as the gospels are pretty easy to listen to, I wonder how successful the recordings of the Prophets are? Commentators have struggled throughout history to make head or tail of Isaiah. Luther may well have had Isaiah in mind when he commented:

"The prophets have a queer way of talking, like people who, instead of proceeding in an orderly manner, ramble off from one thing to the next, so that you cannot make head or tail of them or see what they are getting at."

I wonder if the atmospheric music, passionate reading and dramatized characters will help ease the complexity?

Rape and Murder in Königswinter

Hannah was 14 years old. She lived in Königswinter, a picturesque village on the Rhine, neighbouring my home town of Bonn. On the evening of the 29th of August this year, on the way home from her boyfriend and few hundred yards from her parents' house, a 25 year old Czech bus-cleaner threatened her with a knife, gagged and bound her, and dragged her onto the premises of the company he worked for. In a bus, he raped her. Afterwards he dragged her in front of the bus, where he cut and stabbed her repeatedly until she bled to death.

How do you respond to this? How should you respond to this? I find myself choked, overwhelmed, as if my normal categories can't contain the world anymore. I feel enraged and ask myself what it is I can do in a world like this. And then I feel the fear of knowing that it won't be long until my filters come back into place, and the beauty of the light and the Autumn trees will give me a peace that I know, deep inside, I can never claim to truly own in this world.

There's a groaning in this creation so deep as to unsettle the ground of the earth upon which we stand. I want to weep like Lamentations, and ask myself where is the 'good' that God saw in this creation that he made? I feel the tension between life and death in my own bones, and I want so much to live the way living was meant to be. But I can't, because with every step I know there's death around the corner. Where does the Gospel fit into all this?

Just some Sunday thoughts.

Unconnected to my intention to write this, I listened to the best sermon I've ever heard this afternoon on my i-pod. You can download it here.

Today is Sunday ...

... so I shall take a break from blogging. Tomorrow I shall look at the question of biblical authority.

Just one quick note: the blog Old Testament Passion has a useful link to Zondervan Software which offers free downloads for up to $25 dollars the first time you download a book. Just log in a then type in the code AVZCS8 at checkout. Two books of interest are G. Fee's How to Read the Bible for all it's Worth and K. Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in this Text?

I also recommend a peek at Scott Robert's extremely helpful comments on my 'alethiology' post below, along with John Poitier's qualification of the meaning of the term.

Have a nice Sunday!