Maggie's Farm

In How to Read a Book, Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler describe the most difficult type of reading as ‘reading around the subject’. It entailed reading core materials and then the full spectrum of scholarly opinion surrounding a subject. It’s a difficult proposition. You might even take Van Doren’s corruption in the $64,000 Question quiz show scandal in the 1950’s as an empirical evidence of the difficulty—a gifted academic fooling a credulous public with propped up erudition. (I find this difficulty a mixed blessing, because as tedious as the discipline may be, I can always say, “Well, I haven’t read around the subject.” That is, I have a great deal to learn, the up tick being I remain educable).

Apply the notion of this discipline to a subject like Christian theology. A beginning might be to read Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology (if your first inclination is dispensational), your favorite version of the Bible, and carry a fat Bible concordance for good measure. Cheers. You’ve nowhere near begun.

A friend, years ago a student at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, warned me, “Higher Biblical criticism will rock your little worldview.” Hear, hear! With that notion well and firmly entrenched in your mind you can almost feel the presence of the Lord in the room and His thunderous voice shaking your confidence to its core, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.” What can be shaken will assuredly be shaken.

But I’ve gone beyond reason… No admonition to inscribe the Word of God on the tablet your heart and meditate on it day and night can shake the torpor of the faithful. The insatiable appetite for pap drives so many to ‘Christianity for Dummies’ and the authority of Pastor’s homilies, followed by the peace of godliness, which surpasses understanding, settling into the hearts and minds of the faithful.

How then do we recognize a false teacher? Read the Bible you say? Bravo! Fantastic. But I fear many of the faithful are less than intrepid. Having suppressed their doubts, managing to put on a brave face, they can’t look upon the Holy Word of God without slipping on a filter of doctrine. What’s a Christian to do you ask? Right now pray out loud, “Lord, because I am weak I implore you hold onto me when I cannot hold onto you. Come into my life and shake what can be shaken. I will hold no element of my doctrine so dear as to spare it from relentless examination in your Word. Lord God, Holy Father, give me light. Abba, shake what can be shaken.” Now place a Bible in front of you, place your left hand on the Bible and raise your right hand to God and repeat these words, “With your grace, in all of my imperfection, I will read this well.” This is the act of a revolutionary.

Feh. What nonsense. Too much God will drive you crazy like that Isaiah fellow going naked for, how long (I forget). Go to church on Sunday; just don’t believe a word they say. You’ll be fine. They have pizza every so often on Wednesdays, and there’s almost always coffee and cookies.

BD, I’m listening to Schubert’s Trout Quartet even now. (I bought a new set of Bose headphones). Wonderful! Although I really cannot get the image of a fat trout frolicking in a stream out of my head while I’m listening. It’s quite disconcerting.