I’ve added a few sections of scripture this week to the already long list of passages that confuse or chap me.  It’s comforting – to me at least – to know I’m not the only who has this bad experience again and again with the “good book.” Last night, while baby sitting Brian’s kids, I plucked Philip Yancey’s The Bible Jesus Read from his book case and found some good company and inspiration in quotes like these.  Hope they bring you the same…

Many people these days feel an absence in their lives, expressed as an acute desire for “something more,” a spiritual home, a community of faith.  But when they try to read the Bible they end up throwing it across the room.  To me, this is a good place to start, a sign of real engagement with the God who is revealed in Scripture.  Others find it easy to dismiss the Bible out of hand, as negative, vengeful, violent.  I can only hope that they are rejecting the violence-as-entertainment of movies and television on the same grounds, and that they say a prayer every time they pick up a daily newspaper or turn on CNN.  In the context of real life, the Bible seems refreshing whole, an honest reflection on humanity in relation to the sacred and the profane.  I can’t learn enough about it, but I also have to trust what little I know, and proceed, in faith, to seek God there.

-Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace

There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible-until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves…Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it?  Have we ceased to fight it?  Then perhaps our reading is no longer serious.

For most people, the understanding of the Bible is, and should be, a struggle: not merely to find meanings that can be looked up in books of reference, but to come to terms personally with the stark scandal and contradiction in the Bible itself…

Let us not be too sure we know the Bible just because we have learned not to be astonished at it, just because we have learned not to have problems with it.

-Thomas Merton, Opening The Bible

Kierkegaard dismisses the objection ‘There are so many obscure passages in the Holy Scriptures, whole books which are almost riddles’ with the reply that he would only consider that objection from someone who had fully complied with all the passages that are easy to understand.

-Philip Yancey, The Bible Jesus Read