Why This Approach?

It’s common for some to question our approach to ‘Thinking through the Bible’ since there are other ways of reading through the Bible and thinking about God’s Story. Here are some thoughts by Eugene Peterson in ‘The Jesus Way’:

If we want to get the full impact of the story of Jesus and the way of Jesus, there is no substitute for taking a long, slow, leisurely pilgrimage through the pages of Genesis to Malachi, getting that river of narrative flowing through our bloodstream, observing the enormous attention given to place and person, so that this story is rooted in the immediate and the local, in named people in the neighborhood, among the animals and angels alive in those forests and deserts… We cannot understand the way of Jesus by means of summary accounts of those two thousand years of history and belief and worship that preceded Jesus. If a summary could provide adequate preparation, the Holy Spirit would surely have supplied it and saved us the trouble of making ourselves at home in that narrative country, learning the language of faith, finding our way around the kingdom of God.

Years ago I was traveling along a spectacular mountain road with an old college friend who was visiting from Texas. This road is one of the scenic wonders of North America. My friend had a map open on her knees. I kept pointing out features in the landscape around us: a five-hundred-foot waterfall, a glacial formation, a grove of massive Western Red Cedars, a distant horizon of mountains on which a storm was forming. She rarely looked up; she was studying the map. When I, with some impatience, tried to get her attention, she told me that she wanted to “know where we are.” And “knowing where we are,” for her, was defined by a line on a map. She preferred the abstraction of a road map to the actual colors and forms, the scent and texture of Mount Reynolds, the roar of Logan Creek, an alpine meadow on the way to Piegan Pass, luxurious in bear grass…

Too many of my faith-companions for too long have been reducing the way of Jesus simply to the route to heaven, which it certainly is. But there is so much more.

Dorothy Day, one of our iconic American pilgrims, a sturdy and discerning traveler on this way, loved to quote St. Catherine: “All the way to heaven is heaven, because He has said, ‘I am the way.’”