II Timothy 3:14-17
Until very recently, literacy has
been a rare thing. According to the
U.N., in 2015 the global literacy rate among adults was 86.3%. In 1970, that was only around 67%, and if you
push back to the year 1500, in England only about 10% of men and 2% of women
could read. That seems to have been
about the same overall level as in the Roman Empire, although the fact that
Roman ruins often show graffiti suggests that the ability to read was spread
across classes, like any other skill.
After all, if you can afford a slave to read to you, why waste the time
learning to do it yourself?
But there were scattered groups for
whom reading was important on a level that lifted it above other
abilities. One of those was the
Jews. They had, like everybody else,
their own alphabet and their own way of writing. It had developed, as other writing had
developed in the Middle East, for religious purposes. Eventually, when successive empires sent them
into exile, they took their writings with them and they eventually translated
some of them into the common Greek language that was used all over the
Mediterranean world.
It was that version of the collected
books that we now call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures, in a Greek
translation, that one Jewish convert to Christianity named Paul, born in the
Roman city of Tarsus in what is now Turkey, recommended to a younger Jewish
follower named Timothy, born and raised in a similar background. For the Greeks and Romans and others, to be
able to read was useful. For Paul, it
was a tool to reach out to God, and to be transformed.
“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly
believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you
have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation
through faith in Christ Jesus.”
[II
Timothy 3:14-15]
What you can learn
from that book, he was saying, can open your mind and prepare you for an
encounter with Jesus that will change you for good. That doesn’t rule out those who cannot read,
but if you can read, and have this library of books on hand, you have a head
start.
Not every book is the same, and they
don’t all serve the same purpose. There
are legends and there are histories.
There are love poems and there are war chants. There are lists of people’s ancestors and
there are instructions for priests working at a temple that was destroyed long
ago. There are ethical instructions and
there are stories about some exceedingly unethical people. There are declarations of despair and prayers
of thanksgiving or expressions of hope. But
when you take them all together, and let them sort of stew together inside you
over time, they form a rich nourishment for human life lived in the presence of
God himself.
“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for
teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so
that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good
work.” [II
Timothy 3:16-17]
It’s one of those
rich ironies of God that the letter where Paul said that, along with a lot of
other writings being set down around the same time, give or take a generation,
would themselves come to be considered in the same way and treated with the
same respect.
The strong intellectual tradition of
Greece came to mingle with that originally Jewish tradition of honoring the
scriptures to create the whole stream of Christian theology. A thousand years later, an Italian living in
England, Anselm of Canterbury, said that theology is “faith seeking
understanding”, and it was Christians living in that Greek culture who had set
the early example. Start with
faith. Start with the living experience
of the living Savior, then use all your mind’s resources to understand his
love. You’ll never entirely succeed, but
the effort itself is part of getting to know him and keeping the relationship
fresh and exciting.
The
Greeks who played a large part in the earliest centuries of the Church’s life
knew how to do that. The Creeds that we
still honor are their efforts to put into words the mystery of God’s being, and
to explain how it is that he has come to us in Jesus, and acts among us in the
Holy Spirit. They hashed them out through
long and sometimes heated controversies, always coming back to the scriptures
to test what they were saying, those scriptures being
“the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” [II
Timothy 3:15]
Studying the Bible is a discipline
that keeps our encounters with God in daily life alive. Real study isn’t trying
to pile up facts or sound learned. Real
study is honest evaluation of ourselves and our world in a way that keeps us
from living entirely in our heads or entirely in our emotions. The Bible deals with complex humans and a
complex God in a balanced and complete way, and forces us to do the same thing. A theologian trained in philosophical
technicalities might warn us not to put God into a box by saying:
“the ambiguity of religion shows its
effect on these processes of reductive profanization, just as it shows its
effect in the center of religious self-transcendence.”[1]
But if you want to
remember that point, if you want to learn humility before the Lord, you go to
Isaiah [55:8-9]:
“For my thoughts
are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the
Lord.
For as the heavens
are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Even Jesus, when
tempted to misuse his power, turned to what Deuteronomy had said about finding
guidance beyond ourselves. In a moment
of both spiritual and physical vulnerability, he remembered,
“It is written,
‘One does not live
by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the
mouth of God.’”
[Matthew
4:4]
We
should do as well. We, who are blessed
to be able to read those words, should know them.
So, said a first-century evangelist educated
both in Greece and in Jerusalem:
“as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly
believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you
have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation
through faith in Christ Jesus.”
[II
Timothy 3:14-15]
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