The First Five of Ten Commandments for Bible Reading

                                                                        Herman and Herma Neutics offer the first five of Ten Commandments of Bible Reading 


1.       You shall expect to hear God speak to you through the Bible, even if you are not always aware of it.

2.       You shall treat the Bible as a strange book from far distant cultures. It is written for you but not to you. What you think you know about it will probably mislead you.

3.       You shall hear a word of Grace in the Bible. Humans hate grace, however, and are likely to twist it into a word of self-justification or self-expression.

4.       You shall also hear a word of judgment. You will know by when you hear it as a call to return to the God who loves you and not as a word of condemnation.

5.       Whatever you think you hear in the Bible, if it doesn’t end up with you clinging to and/or shouldering the cross, it’s not God’s word.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Parable of the Talents – A View from the Other Side

May 18, 2010 http://godspace-msa.com/2010/05/18/the-parable-of-the-talents-a-view-from-the-other-side/ As promised here is the second article on economics as presented in the Parable of the Talents .  It presents a very compelling and challenging view of this parable that I think has a lot to say in our present economic situation . This articles is from “Towering Trees and Talented Slaves”, commentary of Ched Myers and Eric DeBode, originally published in  The Other Side Online, © 1999 The Other Side, May-June 1999, Vol. 35, No. 3. The complete article was originally published atwww.theotherside.org/archive/may-jun99/myers.html. The article is no longer available at that site and apparently has all but disappeared from the Internet. The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30   Even more problematic than our sentimentalizing of kingdom parables is the way we misread Jesus’ parables about the world, reading them as if they were kingdom parables—with disastrous consequenc
Read more

Spikenard Sunday/Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

by Columbia Lutherans on Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:55am • THE SERMON “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by-and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don’t know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea’s being born. “I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before-with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call ‘Spikenard Saturday.’ I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about PalmSunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumst
Read more

Am I A Conservative?

Image
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/jacobs/am-i-a-conservative/ By Alan Jacobs • May 31, 2013, 7:55 AM Am I a conservative? Heck if I know. All I know for sure is that the good people here at The American Conservative are interested enough in what I have to say to give me a platform on which to say it. For which I am genuinely grateful. I am not and never have been a Republican. I feel roughly as alienated from that party as I do from the Democratic Party. I hold a number of political views that strong-minded Republicans typically find appalling: I think racism is one of the greatest problems in American society today; I am not convinced that austerity programs are helpful in addressing our economic condition; I am absolutely convinced that what many Republicans call free-market cap
Read more