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Chapter 6
Choosing the Best Doors for Hearing God
Choosing by Engaging
Multiple doors suggest options and options call for choices. The fact about human living is a fact about biblical texts: 'The choice is yours: choose well and your face will be lifted up; choose badly and you can imagine the consequences.'
How are we to choose well when it comes to making our way into the Bible?
Are there criteria for making good choices?
For this too is part of our freedom and responsibility. We are free to choose the doors we go through and the voices we listen to when we read the Bible and responsible to use a good process to do so. We allow the multiplicity to remain, not demanding the uniform kind of unity that claims there is one right interpretation. We select which aspect of the text in the Bible we give our attention to, which issue or issues we make our topic for conversation in our attempt to hear God speak to us.
Good Process
The focus is therefore on 'good process'. Experience tells us that a number of things contribute to good process and they include transparency, agreed procedures, highlighting common ground, listening to marginal voices and leaving room for counter viewpoints. It is also important to treat decisions as giving permission for action while recognising that all decisions are open to reconsideration at a later time. Most critical of all is self-awareness among those involved in the process, particularly among those responsible for leading it.
Knowing Our Assumptions
In making choices, including what aspects of a Bible text we are listening to, we need an acute consciousness of who we are and where we are going. From our experience of the past come the assumptions we carry with us - the preconceptions and prejudices that instinctively frame our thinking. They frame our thinking so instinctively we don't recognise them as the frame, but think they are the picture.
Knowing Our Expectations
From the other direction, our attitude to the future provides the space in our psyche where expectations reside. This sets the agenda for what we expect of ourselves as well as what we expect of others and the world in general, and what they expect of us. Self-awareness of assumptions and expectations helps us recognise how we will subconsciously see things and what seem important to us.
Knowing Our Issues
We also learn much by noticing the things that take our attention and engage our efforts. In particular it pays to take note of what keeps coming into our consciousness, disturbing us or breaking the flow of absorption in what we are doing. These are our issues, the problems, the dilemmas, the questions that butt into our lives and keep concerning us. We may be inclined to push them away because we cannot answer them, or because we know they are the very questions that need to be asked to get to the roots of our problems and that feels too hard a way to go.
As an example, primary questions that regularly come to mind for the writer of these studies are the following.
Who is in charge?
What place has goodness in this world?
Who fits in this world?
'Who is in charge?' opens up questions about power and responsibility. Who is in control? Who can do something constructive?
"What place has goodness in this world?' asks for an appraisal of the world as it is: for example, is it possible to say honestly to a newborn child "the facts are friendly,"[47.] or does evil rule with goodness needed to counter it, or is the world itself neutral? This question also calls for a decision on how to relate to the world - how and where to put goodness into practice.
'Who fits in this world?' lays bare issues of inclusion and exclusion, succeeding and failing. Who is being hurt? Who is being left out by our economics or politics, or by social custom?
These are the questions that I personally, cannot help carrying with me whenever I read the Bible. They are present, consciously or unconsciously, as my contribution to conversation every time I engage with the Bible. If I am to have a real conversation and hear God speak, I cannot hide myself and my interests behind a disguise of objective neutrality. Engagement with a Bible text requires me to be a subject speaking to the text: it implicates me together with my needs and preconceptions, or else it could not be engagement.
What are your 'big questions'?
What issues or dilemmas keep butting in on your life?
What door-ways do your questions lead you towards?
Uncovering An Assumption
God chose Abel over Cain: why? Indeed, why choose? Why did God look favourably on Abel's sacrifice and not Cain's?
Could God not have looked upon both?
It appears that only one can be acceptable and this conveys the assumption that God's regard is something to be given sparingly. Something here is presumed to be scarce and therefore must not be wasted, namely, God's favour, indeed God's love.
Comparing Cain with Esau
Just as Esau asks Isaac "Have you not reserved a blessing for me?" (Gen 27:36), so we might imagine Cain asking God: 'have you not kept any favour for me?' Must there be only one who is blessed, one who is favoured? This "pernicious principle of scarcity", as Schwartz calls it, means there is competition not just to address the physical needs of human life, but also to fill human emotional needs: "The logic of scarcity even governs love."[48.]
The Logic of Scarcity
If Genesis 4 and Genesis 25-27 did not treat scarcity as a fundamental fact of human life, there would seem to be no grounds for the rivalry contained in each story and no need for one to lose in order for the other to gain. What is being assumed is that a particular human being will count for something only at the expense of another or others. That is the logic of scarcity, a logic that makes rivalry, and its corollary violence, inevitable.
This is a genuine and powerful strand of thought in the Bible. Scarcity is part of the reality of life outside Eden. That is, life on planet Earth as we know it has no guarantee that everyone gets equality of circumstances and opportunities. Such is life: we have to live with it. We are wise to remember scarce times even in the midst of current plenty so that the balance doesn't get thrown out, like it can do when farmers indulge in over-expenditure in a boom year. Another example of the folly of not seeing beyond the plenty of the moment happened when the Israelites were in the wilderness post-Sinai. In the passage sometimes entitled "the graves of craving", they complained about lack of food but when an abundance arrived they ate so much that it poisoned them (Num 11:31-35).
The error lies not in claiming that scarcity is a fact of life, but in the assumption that scarcity rules. Other threads within biblical texts speak of plenty. Indeed it begins with the very first commandment in the Bible: "be fruitful and multiply" (Gen 1:28). This alternate vision believes that there is more than enough to go around. It also believes that, like all good gifts, life and the supply of energy for living are not things to be held onto but enjoyed and passed on.
Scarcity and Plenty
The truth about scarcity and plenty is not an argument to be settled. The reality of life is both. Both in continual tension. For example:
A parent loves each child uniquely and distinctly for their own individual self, yet loves every child they have borne or are responsible for.
In good economic times, we need to remember the hard times to keep our perspective but we also need to enjoy the good we are experiencing.
What would be the implications of rewriting the story of Esau and Jacob, with a blessing for both?
What would be gained in the story of Genesis 4 if Cain's offering had got the nod as well? What would be lost?
Beyond Scarcity for God
It is conceivable that God sees no threat in sharing creativity with humans, with Eve who brings children to birth and with Cain and his descendants who develop culture and crafts in the context of city life.
It is also conceivable that God could look more than one way and have regard for the sacrifice of both brothers who come to offer their life and work.
As Schwartz argues, "this vision of plenty" is also in the Bible, "embedded" in it[49.]. It is a minority report, drowned out or blended in by the dominant voice. Church tradition has tended to align itself to the stronger voices of the text, entrenching the dominant strand that assumes scarcity and expects the conflict of winners and losers. But the alternative is available in the Bible, and this is where my theme of multiple door-ways into texts is crucial.
Conversing with the Bible
We never come to the Bible as neutral observers, but always show up with questions, with our concerns that are, like the tip of the iceberg, indicators of the mass that lurks within our sea of living. We read with stuff on our minds - the stuff that 'sticks out' because it disturbs us, like a tooth or a toe that one is only aware of when it is sore, but then acutely aware.
And as we read the text with our concerns honestly before us, we listen for what it speaks back. We're in conversation together: what's on our minds gets drawn into the conversation, just like it does with a good friend. We hear voices that address us, that is, voices that respond to our questions, that are comforting, wise in their advice, or suggestive of change.
Hearing Different Voices
Sometimes the clearest voices that we hear will be the dominant ones within the text, because it is those voices that give the needed energy and open up the future for us.
Sometimes the clearest voices will be the Bible's "counter-testimony" complaining about God and to God, connecting with our need for lament or protest.
Sometimes our troubles will call out the voices that have been hidden - the voices of people who know what it's like to be on the margins. We may hear the undercurrents carried in the text's silences or faint whispers, which give hope in being there.
When we listen openly, receptively and with awareness of our self and our needs, we get a chance to hear from the full range of testimony about God and ways that God can speak to us.
Do we then finally have the truth, the real truth?
Is this the clue to right interpretation of the Bible?
That is, when silenced voices are heard and victims vindicated, will the truth reign and the violence end?
Beyond Rivalry for Truth
The problem is that, as long as we hold on to the expectation that there is one right interpretation, we will continue with the idea of winners and losers and with the conflict of rivalry. The expectation of a single truth keeps people hunting for threads in the Bible to decree the right and legitimate ones. It might be argued, for example, that the dominant voice of the powerful was wrong and that the truth about God will come when we hear the voices of the victims. Raise up the victims: put down the oppressors. But then victims would be encouraged to become victimisers and the hurt and anger from their own suffering turned on others. Also the oppressors would become the oppressed and made the new victims. Whether covert or open, violence will remain the policy so long as it is assumed that only one way can be right and so long as truth itself is treated as a scarce commodity, to be possessed by only one story, one thread, or one school of thought.
Imagine you are telling someone what you believe about an important matter and they say to you: "That may well be, but the truth looks different from here". How does their view affect yours?
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[47.]Margaret Hebblethwaite, Motherhood and God, Geoffrey Chapman, London: 1984, 34.
[48.] ibid., 81.
[49.] ibid., 118.