I share your suspicion on the purpose of the exercise. I do like the idea of befriending the text and in so doing get befriended by God.

I shall go away and mull it over then rehash it a little, publish on this blog site and pass it off as all my own work.

Thanks for taking the time to come back to me.

Steve

If you had time one day I’d love to hear from you about the references to e-mail (with mental steps sideways) that are littered through both testaments (according to BC’sLC).

Anyway, I’m very much with your argument about Paul. He couldn’t let go, could he? I picture him restlessly pacing the room as he dictates to Tertius (or some other unfortunate scribe trying to keep up with his flow). If there was e-mail he’d be down the cafe as soon as he arrived wherever checking his mail and adding to his blog and sending a whole stream of e-mails to everyone in all the churches until the cafe-owner turfed him out and put his chair on top of the computer.

He sums up the relentlessness of his passion to impress all and sundry with his message (and to check that they are not going dodgy on him) in that bit about his motivation in 1 CORINTHIANS 9:22 – “I have become all things to all people so that I might by any means save some”.

The man would have loved e-mail.

However, I SUSPECT that the whole purpose of the exercise was to show that we can’t apply the Bible to life today without great, risky, arabesque-like leaps of interpretation. The Bible simply doesn’t work like a health and safety manual for life. I prefer to think that it is deliberately awkward and elusive in so many ways so that we have to engage in a process of BEFRIENDING the TEXT, a process that should puzzle, intrigue, challenge and extend us for the whole of our lives…. and somewhere in the befriending of the text we should discover that we’ve actually met and been befriended by GOD.

Howzzat? JC