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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't Let the Bible Become an Idol, May 27, 2008
This review is from: From Stone to Living Word: Letting the Bible Live Again (Paperback)
Debbie Blue's latest book is both intellectual and personal, down to earth and yet also extremely deep. Debbie is a pastor at House of Mercy and "emerging" church in the Twin Cities. This book is not so much a linear argument, but rather a series of examples of how to read the Bible as a living document that confounds our idolatrous systems of doctrines and easy answers. In fact, I get the impression that the chapters in this book could have been written as sermons for her church, in that each one of them not only stands alone, but the each also take a particular text of scripture and reflect on how it confounds our expectations about God and tears down the idols of our day to day lives.
If there is any overarching theme of the book it is idolatry, which as Debbie defines it, is pretty much anything that we use to tame life, control the uncertainty of existence, and bring stability to the chaos. Blue shows us how even our many religious conceptions about the Bible and the God of the Bible are themselves idols if we use them to try to contain and control and tame God. She seems to be advocating that faith that is more about simply living in the wildness and mystery and confusion of life, than about trying to use faith to bring stability and certainty to life. This is a message that is at the same time both liberating and frightening. Liberating in that I don't have to try to explain away all the messiness anymore, or make excuses for God. But frightening too, in that I like my idols: my revolutionary ideals, my hope in what I think is God's plan for the future (both personally and globally), my picture of who Jesus is and what he was about. And Debbie herself shares many of these ideals. And yet at the same time she is relentless about mocking and smashing even her own idols.
In their place she recommends only love, but not in a sappy, generic, overused way. Rather she presents love as itself an almost undefinable mystery that confounds our attempts to idolize it. Love as unconditional acceptance even to the point of undermining our sense of justice (think Jesus with the tax collectors). In so doing she opens up the Bible in new ways, asks new questions, forces us to sympathize with characters (the Pharisees for instance) that we were comfortable relegating to the idolatrous category of "villain".
This is a way of reading scripture that I am slowly learning - to read it not as a source of mere ideas or ideals, but as a living conversation, whose point is to tear down my conceptual idols, not build them up. People will often hold up the contradictions and difficult parts of the Bible as evidence of its worthlessness as scripture - if God's will isn't clearly spelled out in black and white, what good is it? But according to Blue, those difficulties and contradictions may be the whole point. What if God's main concern is not to give us a book that will answer all our questions and bring us stability in a chaotic world, but rather, is to give us a book that will shake us up, that will leave us with more questions than when we started, so that we will be forced to wrestle through them and search together in community for how to live with love in this crazy, messy, chaotic world? What if the point of the Bible is not information, but transformation? What if it's supposed to be not propositional, but provocative? What if it is in itself a challenge to idolatrous faith, including idolatrous Bible-based faith? Blue's book does a good job of demonstrating how the Bible is exactly that.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Let My Bible Go": Debbie Blue's Liberating Theology, July 21, 2008
This review is from: From Stone to Living Word: Letting the Bible Live Again (Paperback)
Debbie Blue's latest book, From Stone to Living Word, is a rarity. It's an original work of theology from the pen (or keyboard) of a working preacher. Too often, we assume seminary professors write original theology, while working pastors write "inspirational" books with "take-aways" for how to live a Christian life. Blue is part of an older tradition, dating back at least to the apostle Paul, and carried forward by Augustine, Luther and Calvin, among others. Her vocation as a founding pastor House of Mercy, one of the world's most vibrant emergent churches (located in St. Paul MN), has shaped her deeply humane and original approach to reading the Bible.
Blue realizes that all-too-often, we Christians read the Bible as if on a mission to jam its uncanny, poetic and evocative language into the confines of a moralistic worldview. Whether fundamentalist, mainstream or liberal, we want the Bible to resolve our doubts and tell us what to do. But what if the Bible doesn't work like that? What if it confounds our certainties and challenges our convictions? Blue invites us to converse with, rather than worship, the Bible. She suspects this conversation will illuminate mysterious and wild paths to God. Drawing on the Midrash, as presented in the work of Avivah Zornberg, Blue looks beneath the ossified surface of our habitual responses to the Bible. She thereby uncovers contested meanings and alternative voices that grace the text. The Bible opens us to mystery, presenting fluid rather than fixed meanings. Blue is not without ethical concerns, however. Influenced by the writings of James Alison, she advocates a humane reading of the Bible, a reading that avoids the creation of villains and scapegoats. She invites the reader to suspend habitual judgments, to open herself to new images of God. In Blue's writing, the reader encounters an oceanic God -- a God who flows beyond the stony confines of our harsh judgments and small bigotries.
I should add that this book is a page-turner, which counts for a lot if one thinks theology ought to be read in churches, homes and on the bus, not just in seminaries and universities. Students of Barth, Nietzsche and the like will be amazed at how agilely Blue addresses weighty issues in readable, lively prose. She writes with the clarity and grace of an E.B. White. This is a book you'll actually want to read, not just stare at on your bookshelf.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
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Are We Suppose to Worship The Bible?, April 23, 2008
This review is from: From Stone to Living Word: Letting the Bible Live Again (Paperback)
The author has obviously been plotting this book for many years. She worries that many Christians see the Bible as an idol rather than as a testament to the living God. In other words they worship the Bible not the living God. The Bible as she thinks about it is a testament to a the living God not an idol.
She will come to this point over and over from different directions. It's like she's not going to give up until we get it. She also takes several key scripture passages and chews them up and finds some good stuff!
Her writing is very good and will get your attenion - her style is earthy,gutzy and maybe a little "in your face". She draws illustrations from her life as a pastor, a writer, a mother and a wife many of them pretty funny! I particlarly liked her pointing out that it's easy to think you love and idol in her case Bob Dylan (briefly) because you don't know them. Read this book you'll love it
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