Sara Barton: On Bibliolatry

I’m continuing to explore the world of Wineskins featured authors. Today I’ve been poking around the website for Sara Barton, a professor of English and Religion at Rochester College.

And, well, this is a little intimidating. I mean, I’ve taken English courses. Lots of them. And I have not a single pleasant memory of a college-level English course. None. Zilch. In fact, I keep thinking I’m going to be marked down a letter grade for a mispelled misspelled word. I mean, I’m typing in terrer terror.

So this is a struggle for me. Despite the winsome [Vocabulary word! Extra credit?] photograph of Sara — whom I’ve never met — I just have trouble getting started with the task at hand [Dang! A hackneyed phrase.]

So … anyway … casting aside all rules of punctuation because, dang it!, I’m 59 and not in her English class and really just don’t care what she thinks about my grammar …

She’s really quite a fine writer. Here’s a sample from May 2013.

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The Bible is a flesh and blood story. Now, when I refer to the Bible as a story, I don’t mean fictional or made up.  I mean that it makes sense with a unified plot from beginning to end, and we understand it best when we understand the whole story, not when we take small bits out of context without keeping the rest in mind.

The Bible is a grand story telling us how God did not give up on human beings when we rejected heaven’s way of doing things; instead God became one of us, and showed us what it’s like when heaven comes to earth in flesh and blood. …

I tell you.  I love this story.

I love it so much that I have a confession: Sometimes I am more comfortable loving the story than I am loving the one to whom it points and the people he calls me to embrace.  Bibliolatry describes people who hold to such high view of the Bible and perhaps biblical interpretation that they stop seeing God because they can’t stop looking at the book that points to God.

I think it’s almost impossible to grow up in the Stone-Campbell Movement of my heritage without a tension with bibliolatry.  We love the Book.  But, here’s the thing:  sometimes I think we love our interpretation of the book more than we actually love the Book itself.  And that is actually self-idolatry.  So, when I’m honest, my confession is not only bibliolatry, but self-idolatry. I really like my interpretation of the Bible; sometimes I love it more than I love my brothers and sisters in Christ who interpret the Bible differently – and that’s not a life shaped by the cross, shaped by the flesh and blood of Jesus when heaven came to earth.

At times, I am tempted to love my interpretation more than I love God.  Even calling it my interpretation is a bad starting point.  Nothing about God’s story was meant to have a first-person pronoun attached to it. …

Sometimes I need a reminder that it’s Jesus I’m following, not my own interpretation of the Bible.  And when others in the body of Christ don’t agree with me, I shouldn’t make it about me.  Finding this balance between believing wholeheartedly in the importance of full gender inclusion in church ministries and respecting my brothers and sisters who see it differently is making me more like Jesus.

But it’s terribly hard sometimes — something like eating flesh and drinking blood.

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Wow! And she uses dashes and italics and starts sentences with coordinate conjunctions. Like me.

You see, anyone can follow the rules. The art is in knowing when and how to break the rules. And how to say something worth someone else’s reading.

Good writing only comes from good thinking. Organized writing only comes from an organized mind. And the rules are there just so the grammar doesn’t get in the way of readers’ hearing your thoughts. Really.

Often the best writing is self-revelatory. And Sara shows herself quite the craftsman by using her own revealed weaknesses to help me and her other readers see our own flaws. She confesses sin in hopes that I’ll see the same sins in myself. That’s courageous and loving. Indeed, she sacrifices herself for the sake of the readers. And that makes for Christian writing.

And so. Like I said. She’s really a fine writer.