Honored in the Absence -Christian use of Scripture

The whole religious climate in this country is getting very depressing and dangerous.  We have a very strong Christian religious fanatical element. We have a strong Roman Catholic tradition that has lots of rigid and dogmatic positions. The Pope seems to be trying to bring the "ship" around a bit, but that is slow. We have a growing faithful Muslim community and some rabid fundamentalist Muslims as well.  The Muslim fundamentalists have a lot of mixed motives and reasons for their attacks upon the West.

Today while sitting in a worship service, the name of William Stringfellow came back to me.  William Stringfellow was an American lay theologian. He was a Harvard educated lawyer. He was  a civil rights activist.  Stringfellow was convinced at Baptism one entered one into a lifelong struggle against the "powers and principalities" of systematic evils. This is what the New Testament calls the powers of death.   This is larger and more devious than individual sins. This is the power and authority that institutions, government. international corporations, and even church denominations. From his convictions Stringfellow insisted on the primacy of the Bible for Christians.

I remember reading of one of his experiences. It seems he was working in Harlem with Dorothy Day. He was working out of a church that had a swimming pool. It was one of the few swimming pools in the neighborhood.  In order to be able to use the swimming pool, youth had to come to Sunday School. Stringfellow was asked to teach the class of high school youths. He tried to follow the church literature for a while, but it was so deadly. He decided that he would resort to Scripture. Every Sunday morning he would simply read them the book of Romans.  The students just sat there and looked bored.  But every Sunday morning he would re-read the book of Romans. Finally after six or seven weeks some of the students began to ask him questions about the book and about the message. He had some significant life changing experiences with those young people.

Almost every Christian Church I know talks about the primacy of Scripture, but you really have to wonder what that means.  So many of the places I visit have an hour or more of worship service, but there is no more than two or three minutes of attention give to the "hearing of the Word."  There are worship services where they read two or three passages of Scripture, but the person who is reading the scriptures does it so poorly that no one can hear the words.  Of course, there are services of worship where the scriptures are so mistreated. They are not even given serious intellectual examination. Poetry is taken as history.  History stories are taken as prophecy.  Events in the Old Testament are supposed to be predictive of events in the 21st century. Symbolism is taken literally.
Cultural traditions are made into divine commandments.  As so often is said one can make the scriptures support anything you want.

The Bible is a collection of reports, conversations, witnesses, personal testimonies, poetry, songs, and memories about God and what he has done in the lives of those people.  We are invited to join in that conversation. It obviously suggests that God may be active in our history in our lives in unique and unexpected ways, but the ways and the circumstances of the past are not the divine requirements.  If God enables Samson to kill lions with a jaw bone of an ass, does not mean that his disciples now ought to all carry jaw bones for protection. It may suggest that God will equip his servant with the items she needs when confronting danger, but it is not always a jaw bone.

For the Christian religion, and Presbyterians are Reformed and one of our mottoes is "Sola Scriptura" to be so dogmatic about the Bible and then to spend so little time on honest serious study and discussion of it,  denies its own affirmations about the role of scripture in their thinking.