The Bible

Some stimulating quotes:
--"The Bible is a record of God's search for humanity."--Robert McAfee Brown
--"We have so much to say about the Bible that we have we are not prepared to hear what the Bible has to say about us."--Abraham Heschel
--"The Bible is not just man's word about God but also God's word about man."--Karl Barth
--"Instead of reading the Bible as orthodoxy, or morality, or history, we take the Bible as a range of imagination that provides the community around the text with narrative and stories and songs and poetry and images that have the potential to move outside themselves . . . the Bible is not "user-friendly" for people who like the way the world is organized. It is inherently subversive." --Walter Brueggemann
--"There is no way you can read the entire Bible seriously and take every word literally. Contradictions start in the first two chapters of Genesis. There are two Creation stories, two stories of the making of Adam and Eve. And that is all right. The Bible is still true."--Madeleine L'Engle
--A redescribing of reality
--Understanding the world and ourselves through the lens of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

Key to our thinking about a "Jesus-centered" approach to reading and study of the Bible:
--"We need to read the Bible in principle and practice beginning with the gospel narrative of Jesus and the radically new thing he brings to the human situation. Jesus does not fit any of the current schemes of biblical interpretation, biblical literalist, literary critical, dispensationalist, which make the text more important than Jesus himself and thus neutralize the revolution of his teaching. Rather we should see that Jesus has brought a transforming possibility of nonviolence and forgiveness to our way of being human, and all biblical interpretation, including the pathways of revelation in the Old Testament, flow from that." --Anthony Bartlett

"Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." --Jesus in John 14:9
Much more to come.