Lucy and the Book

I’ve been struck lately by the uniqueness of the experience of reading the Bible as compared to reading other books. Normally I hate the term “strategy,” but in the same way Lucy goes into the silent and mysterious upstairs of the wise magician’s house in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader armed with a plan for finding what she needs in his book, I need to get a few principles into words.

1. It disallows reading with “an open mind” (and thus debunks the fallacy that such a thing as an “open” and uncommitted mind is even possible). ”Without faith it is impossible to please Him,” says Hebrews 11, “for he who comes to God must first believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” The scriptures yield their riches to a seeking mind, but they’re not really designed to be a set of rational proofs one way or the other. If we’re not coming prepared to believe, we can expect to resemble the dwarves in The Last Battle, who ingest a magnificent feast and experience it as straw and dung.
2. It is “living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). Don’t come to this book expecting it to be subordinate to your methods of analysis. Rather, expect it to lay you open. God created the world through “the Word” (John 1), making a series of finer and finer distinctions through the act of speaking. This identifies the incarnate Word with the written Word. It must be understood in terms of this claim to be dynamic, the creative Source of all things — including our tools of analysis, and our finite minds themselves.
3. Questions can be productive or defensive. I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, “If God’s circle is our square, then we have no basis on which to relate.” Or something like that. We’re made in His image, and He’s not threatened by our questions because they’re evidence of that family stamp. He welcomes any expression of seeking, and will satisfy some questions; for others He insists upon faith. In reading the Bible, I have to remember the difference between questioning as a means of seeking, and questioning as a means of playing intellectual games, or fending off the necessity for faith. That line is probably different for everyone.
4. His logic is more often the logic of paradox than of sequential reasoning. Often in scripture His answers seem like non sequiturs: Job asks, “Why are You causing me to suffer?” God responds, but not with an answer to that question. He offers something immeasurably more wonderful: a glimpse of his face, and a poem about His power. It’s enough to satisfy Job: “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees Thee. I repent.” I don’t believe that’s God scolding Job for questioning Him. I believe it’s God enlarging and redefining Job’s question, a powerfully compassionate move on God’s part that enables Job to live in truer relatedness to Him. Jesus does the same thing quite often, when he’s asked one question but answers (seemingly) another.
5. Getting the questions right may be more important to God than answering them. I don’t mean this at all in the way the intellectual in The Great Divorce means it; I don’t mean that God wants us to play mind games and give up our burning curiosity about Him in exchange for the worship of impressive questions. I mean that He is larger than we can grasp, and getting our questions aimed at the right phenomena, and mapped out in words that rightly measure the size and complexity of the mysteries that attract us, yield abundantly more insight into who He is and what His intentions are toward us than holding firm to small criteria that suffocate the Truth out of the eternal God.

That’s all for now. But I’m thinking of the feeling of apprehension and fear that we have for Lucy as she reads, of the power of the book to play with reality, of its literal responsiveness, and of its beauty. We should all be so lucky — to come to the book alone, and leave with the Lord himself padding beside us.