'Finally, he spoke up. He seemed to be having his own internal conversation: "Besides, the whole notion of authority as so many people conceive it is thoroughly modern." Now, I must have looked even more confused, because Neo gently hit me on the shoulder, smiled, and winked. "Relax, Dan, I'm only saying what the Bible says. That oft-quoted passage in Second Timothy doesn't say, 'All Scripture is inspired by God and is authoritative.' It says that Scripture is inspired and useful--useful to teach, rebuke, correct, instruct us to live justly, and equip us for our mission as the people of God. That's a very different job description than we moderns want to give it. We want it to be God's encyclopedia, God's rule book, God's answer book, God's scientific text, God's easy-steps instruction book, God's little book of moral for all occasions. The only people in Jesus' day who would have had anything close to these expectations of the Bible would have been the scribes and Pharisees. Right?"

'All I could say was, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute." Then I said, "What--do you want me to throw out the Bible, then?" Neo said, "Daniel, Daniel, a little defensive, aren't you? I never said anythiung like that. I think that when you let go of the Bible as God's answer book, you get it back as something so much better."

Passage from A New Kind of Christian, by Brian D. McLaren. Brian is a 1982 graduate of Baylor University.

This passage has got me a little messed up, to be sure. Because the "Neo" character is so obviously right: by using the Bible as a hard and fast rulebook and smacking people in the face with it when we find them to be wrong, we are very clearly being modern-day Pharisees. Just like them, we've lost the point of why God even wastes any time on us to begin with and we're just out to make sure everybody is playing by the rules.

I need to ponder this further. While I'm sure that to anybody outside of Christianity this is something that's blatantly obvious, it hits me like a smack in the face.

Listening to: Nu Thang by dcTalk (always good for a laugh)