Faith Works 7-29-22

Faith Works 7-29-22
Jeff Gill

Where do you get your information from
___

My primary source of information is from reading.

I'm not going to try to pretend that I don't watch TV, but for a variety of reasons I tend not to trust it. By the same token, I'm acutely aware of how I take material in print altogether too seriously. Can something be typeset and run through vast printing presses and sold in upscale bookshops and still be balderdash, not to say malarkey? Absolutely.

That's who I am, though. I have from my childhood taken published materials very much to heart. Of course, being a reader means you can end up learning years later, and sometimes embarrassingly, that the pronunciation you've heard in your head for so very long is so very wrong. Being a "reading first" person is a great way to go wrong with confidence.

Raised in a church which takes the Bible very seriously, I trace the origin of my print preferences back to those heavy King James Version volumes, the lighter and newer Revised Standard Version copies of scripture, and then in high school I was given a Good News Bible, in paperback, with those evocative line drawings in them (if you know, you know). Later I would pick up The Living Bible and New International Version editions, a Jerusalem Bible and New English Bible copies for reference, and now I have two tubs full of different translations . . . all in tubs because I can get all of them on my tablet or phone, and increasingly I use those for study and devotions and sermon preparation.

But wait, is that print material? It's text on a . . . page? Pixels? The simulation of a typeface and volume, but one I tap and swipe. I still recall the first time I referred back to one of my print Bibles and tried to double-finger pinch to enlarge text on it. Paper has many advantages, but that's not one of them.

What I learned from youth up through seminary, though, was how to use information sources to my benefit. To read the Bible, to consult concordances and Bible dictionaries, preaching guides and lectionary tools, and expand my understanding of how God is speaking today from out of the Hebrew and Greek whence they began (and I've got multiple copies of both those languages, plus some Latin and German laying around somewhere).

In all of that I wrestled with how to discern from ancient texts a modern application; to consider context and peel back the translations and get at what is being said, how the church has sifted and canonized these particular words, and affirms them to the church and the world as God's Word, speaking to us. No matter how inerrant anyone's views are, there's a realization that following initial manuscripts and within the translation process, we still are often a work in progress to get at where God is speaking — but most Christians of any sort are bound together in the promise and expectation that God is speaking to us there.

Not that long ago, in historical terms, the average home in central Ohio at best had maybe three books in it: an almanac, Pilgrim's Progress, and the King James Bible. You might have a monthly or even weekly publication showing up on your doorstep, on more perishable paper than the vellum volumes, a "Newark Advocate" or "Christian Messenger" with insights and opinions mixed with the news of the day, but that was about it. You didn't have to spend a great deal of time wondering about agendas implied in how the story was told, you got that up front.

I would suggest that we're still not so far removed from those days, quaint though that fire-lit picture might seem. Oh, we've moved on in print and glossy paper and TVs and now the internet, but as readers and discerners, we're not that different from our great-great-grandparents. We wrestle with how to get at who is speaking to us, in which texts or glowing screens, from which agendas, to what ends.

This is the great burden and opportunity for churches today: to help people sift wheat from chaff, to learn how to sort out base metal counterfeits from true coins of fact, to read and discern what we're being told. From the Bible to the pages of yes, even this newspaper.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's acutely aware of how the sausage gets made. Tell him what you think is going into the grinder at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.