Pastor Kim's Blog

Part of the challenge of living in our rapidly changing culture is knowing what to hang on to and what to let go. I don’t mean material things like old furniture. I mean the beliefs and convictions about the world that give meaning and purpose to our lives. Some of us would like to keep everything the way it was with no change at all and some of us change so easily we seem to lack any stability at all. Are all our cherished values of no value anymore? Are our commitments of faith and our understanding of life as unstable and unrealistic as we are often encouraged to believe? How do we decide what things should be discarded and what things should be kept?

One of the dynamics of the protestant reformation that began just under 500 years ago was the deliberate commitment to the Bible as the only guide for understanding the truth about what is right to believe and how we should live. Just writing that sentence makes me feel like an alien in my current cultural environment. And yet our culture owes so much to the truths found in that book. The ideas of the dignity of the person, the pursuit of justice, the practice of love and mercy in caring for the oppressed, and many more, are found in that book and many institutions have been founded upon those ideas.

As a culture we have marginalised the Bible so far from public sight that we are not even aware we have done so. (Perhaps if it stays in those hospital drawers for the sick and needy those Christians will be quiet!). What is ironic about our turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to the Book is that some of the wise men of our age are beginning to say things that sound quite familiar to those who are at least a little acquainted with its content. I was recently reading an author, who makes no claim to be a Christian, who was searching around for some understanding of what is unique about being human. His interest was in the building of political systems for social cohesion. He almost plagiarised a passage from Genesis on the uniqueness of the human being as one who rules over its environment. This same author has recognised in other places that the biblical description of humankind, though thousands of years old, still functions quite well.

I personally have found the Bible to be far more trustworthy in its descriptions of what life is and how we should live it than what has been offered by a myriad of philosophers, mystics, ethicists, scientists, etc. We can learn much from these avenues of human wisdom and knowledge but they fall short of the wisdom found in the Bible. You may not be as cynical as a line from a Dylan song ‘all the truth in the world adds up to one big lie’ but sometimes you might feel that way. And if you do, you know where I would suggest you look.

Your Brother,
Kim