In our Sunday gathering today the main speaker was talking about all the changes that happen in our world. He was relating these modern changes to the changes that the nation of Israel was facing before and during the Babylonian captivity. By doing so he was trying to show us how some of Jeremiah’s prophetic statements (during that time) were radical re-interpretations of more traditional Judaic thought. Instead of seeing Jesus as a political/temporal type of king or ruler, Jeremiah was telling Israel that God had a MUCH MUCH bigger plan…one with universal/eternal significance.

There were many interesting ideas packed into this lesson, but the one that struck me was that God’s word (and revelation through various means) is living and active. What does that mean to be "living and active"? Not static, but dynamic, perhaps? Able to breathe life into our existence and our world. At work, organic, adaptable, invigorating. I guess it can mean a lot of things, but to me most of all it means that God’s word requires constant interpretation and re-interpretation. God’s revelations is not something given that our parent’s generation, or our parents’ parents generation, or even Martin Luther’s parents generation GOT ALL figured out for all people and for all time. (God is so much bigger than a few centuries of human theological grappling and He usually has bigger plans than we could possibly imagine.) I’m not saying we can’t learn from the traditions that came before us; obviously we can learn so much from all the saints of Christ that came before us. We are eternally indebted to them for their pilgrimmage of faith that has sustained our tradition, but…

We must grapple with our faith (our mission, our theology, our paradigms, etc.) within our current context in order to cope with the ongoing experience. The challenges that face us today will be different from those that faced our forefathers. The Church should look different as it grows through the centuries. It’s called maturity and we’d prideful to feel as if "we’d arrived" in our understanding of God and His mission to redeem the earth and all that’s in it. Something that is "living and active" must have room and potential to grow further. It’s not a closed system.

This was supposed to just be a preface for another Newbigin quote! Sorry, I got carried away. Now, I’ll put the quote (which most of you will probably not have the patience to read…oh, well.):

The Christian tradition of rationality takes as its starting point not any alleged self-evident truths. Its starting point is events in which God made himself known to men and women in particular circumstances–to the first apostles and witnesses who saw and heard and touched the incarnate Word of God himself, Jesus of Nazareth. These are all happenings within the world of secular events, the world which is investigated by the natural and human sciences. These revelations were always addressed to men and women in particular contexts and called for specific responses within and appropriate to those contexts. The community which responded to this call and challenge had to make sense of and cope with the ever-changing circumstances of their ongoing history in the light of what had been revealed to them in the original events. The originally given revelation had to be continually re-appropriated and re-interpreted in the light of new situations. It had to be tested to see whether it could continue to provide coherence and meaning for new experience. It was tested almost to the breaking point, especially in the experience of the destruction of the Jewish state and the long exile. That testing in turn provided the background through which the shattering experience which the first disciples had in the sequence of events leading up to Good Friday could be re-understood within the terms of the original revelation. Continually through the centuries the community seeks to find coherence, meaning, and hope in the events, sometimes apparently meaningless and chaotic events, through which it lives. As we have seen in looking at the work of science, so here the argument is necessarily circular. The believer starts from the faith that reality is rational, that a coherent purpose can be discerned in experience. The struggle is to prove that faith true in circumstances which seem to call it in question. The effort is always a rational effort, an effort to find rational meaning in apparently irrational events through the pattern given in the original revelation. So the tradition is being continually being reshaped and re-appropriated in the struggle to cope with ongoing experience.

Lesslie Newbigin
Gospel in a Pluralist Society