I have been claiming that to listen to God, a person needs to "buy into" the idea that God has spoken in and through Jesus. This idea carries with it a second idea--that we must be willing to allow that God also speaks to us through the Bible. For those who question the value of the Bible in this process, allow me to give a brief reason for relying upon Scripture for a communication from God.
First, this is where we find the most all inclusive account of the life, work, personality and ideas of the person called Jesus. While there are various other references to Jesus (both implied and direct) in ancient writings, all of them are made in passing. None of them (with the exception of those mentioned below) have Jesus as their focal point. If you really want to discover Jesus, the New Testament is where you must go to do this.
Which documents we look to when we search for the Jesus we are going to listen to is extremely important. This is because, when we put ourselves in a truly listening posture, we are letting our guard down, just as we do with other human beings. When we really listen to another human being, we drop our defenses. We put down our guard, we suspend our judgment, we let what they are saying challenge us, encourage us, change our thinking, affect our behavior. When we listen to God, we allow him to do all of this. When we listen to God through Jesus, we allow all of this. When we listen to God through Jesus, as he is presented to us in a written text (like the Gospels), we are letting that text have access to the control of our lives. That is why it is so important which text we allow to speak to us this way.
This is why it is important that we understand that the New Testament Gospels are a reliable source for information about Jesus. This is a contested statement in our larger culture. Increasingly, certain groups of scholars want to suggest that all sorts of other documents are better sources for finding out about Jesus and his teachings. This is not the place to get into a detailed discussion of this phenomenon. But the following may be helpful: Only the New Testament Gospels tell similar stories about Jesus while also giving us multiple witnesses to the events. This is very important. It is like getting statements from each of 4 people who witness an accident at an intersection, each of them standing on a different corner of the intersection. They all report the same basic event, but their individual "take" on what they saw is somewhat different in detail. This is the kind of of "witness" that investigators want as they study what happened. It can be frustrating at times (just like the Gospels), but you can make sense out of it.
When we look at all the other texts that claim to be on the same level of seriousness as the Gospels, but which are not included in the New Testament, we have something quite different. Many of the scholars who wish to take this material into account do not often tell their readers that this other material . . . 1) Comes from a time much later than the 4 New Testament Gospels (which were written within living memory of Jesus himself). 2) That this material often has a distinct theological "flavor" that can be easily identified and that leads into a variety of ideas that the New Testament as a whole condemns. 3) That only rarely can the various stories in these materials be made to sound like they are talking about the same Jesus. They each present a different and often odd "Jesus." 4) The Jesus they represent almost never sounds anything like the Jesus of the New Testament Gospels, while one can easily make the connections between the Jesus of Mark and the Jesus of Luke, which are not all that far from the Jesus of John.
So, which "version" of Jesus we listen to matters a great deal. Of all the competing versions, I think the "version" offered to us in the New Testament Gospels is the most self-consistent, meaningful and helpful version. And I have looked at many of the others as well. And since I am going to end up submitting the formation of my mind and my life to one of these versions, I have to tell you that I have been pretty cautious about my conclusions.
So as not to disappoint those who hoped I would include something practical in this blog, let me close with this: We can read the Bible for information. We have all done this, some more than others. When we do this, we are looking for stories with moral points, teachings that tell us what to do about this or that situation, principles to apply, and so forth. I am not personally convinced that such reading is all that helpful in a serious walk with God. But we have all done it and we will all continue to do it at some level, myself included.
But when we are "listening" we are reading differently. It is much more like reading a letter from someone whose wisdom we seek. More than that, it is like going to spend time with a person whom you greatly respect and who has consistently opened up to you new understandings of your own life, the way the world works, what other people are like. It is like going into that person's presence, knowing that you will always walk away with something valuable, but never knowing what it might be beforehand. You go trusting that something will be said that will matter, that will make a difference, that will make you more real.
When we come to the Bible and read with that kind of attitude, it changes things. The practical side of it is that, as you read, thoughts, ideas, understandings come into one's mind that are new, challenging, profound. It is the constant practice of this kind of reading that provides an increasingly deep pool of experience by which we can and do judge what we think that we are hearing at later times. This is, of course based on the idea that God himself inhabits his people through his Holy Spirit, so that we have the means to recognize God's "voice" when we hear it. More about that in the next blog, together with some practical ideas about how we actually come to know how "speaks" to us individually.
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