Feb. 7 Flashback: Look up

Here’s what it sounded like to visit this blog when it first began.

From February 7, 2013, “Don’t look at the finger, look at the moon“:

The Bible, Chalke argued, confronts us with “a hard choice; a choice between the current dominant view of what Scripture tells us about this issue and the one I honestly think it points us to.”

I’ve often written of that choice in terms of the proverb/koan about the finger and the moon. The Bible is like a finger pointing at the moon. Some of us are focused on the moon. Some of us are focused on the finger.

This argument has continued for so long because the opposing sides do not agree on the nature of the dispute. People like Siebert and Chalke (and me) propose one approach to dealing with conflicts in the Bible, places where particular passages or specific laws or clobber texts contradict the larger themes of the whole of scripture. The other side of this argument does not simply disagree with our approach to such conflicts, it denies that any such conflicts do or can exist.

And so round and round we go in this never-ending argument. The particulars change, but the pattern is always the same whether it’s Eric Siebert talking about violence, or Steve Chalke talking about same-sex relationships, or Jonathan Blanchard talking about slavery, or Paul talking about circumcision, or Peter talking about unclean Gentiles, or Jesus talking about the Sabbath, or Isaiah talking about feast days.

We’re looking at the moon. They’re shouting, “How dare you take your eyes off the finger?”

Read the whole post here.