What if we (okay, I) were to walk up to a stranger, a neighbor, and a friend, as ask an open ended question about a biblical text? Asking questions like "what do hear in this passage?" or "what words or images come to mind when you hear this...?" What would be the types of responses? Maybe a text like, "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof;" or, "love your enemies;" or the "children of God... shining like stars."
As this class began to study the Apostles Creed, I was invited to speak on the first article from a Mennonite perspective.
I tried to explain a little of the Mennonite history of baptism upon confession and how it was interpreted as a protest against a state run church; how refraining from infant baptism was an act of treason against the state (a form of tax evasion); how Anabaptist folk were driven to the wilderness and countryside through harsh persecution. Persecution made all the more harsh by the wedded powers of the church and the state. Eventually transitioning to a rural and agrarian culture. It was hard to keep this moving forward for a bunch of 12 and 13 year olds. So I tried not to dwell on too much history.
We talked a little about the historic experience of Mennonites in Europe, fleeing to Russia. While not trying to slight the Swiss Mennonites, we spoke only briefly of the 13 families that came to Pennsylvania by invitation of William Penn. But manly, we spoke of the Dutch/Low German Mennonites who journeyed to Russian, becoming, at Catherine the Great's pronouncement, the "quiet in the land". These Mennonites quietly came to America beginning in the 1870s to the Great Plains, leading to the growth of Mennonite farming and the affected the world-wide production of wheat. A historical event that we still experience with every bite of bread. Model A Distinctive Characteristics: The Bible as a Book of Inerrant Facts
2. Each word of the Bible is considered divinely chosen, and it is inerrant in all things, including science and history.
3. In all regards he Bible is considered to be the judge of human thought and in no way is it to be judged by us.
1. Faith relationship replaces dependence on rational procedures. God can be known not by the mind alone, but by faith encounter with Jesus Christ, God incarnate.
2. The Bible is the word of God because by the Holy Spirit it is the instrument by which God in Christ encounters a person. The Bible is not diminished in its power by the presence of archaic and superseded conceptions of past times and cultures in matters of science and history as well as in religious and ethical realms.
3. The major emphasis is on God's act of self-revelation rather than on the process by which Scripture was written. The inspiration of its authors is not denied, but the stress is on the impact of the Holy Spirit on the readers of Scripture.
2. The accent is on the Bible's function as communicating a divine message in human forms of thought. The message speaks to the needs of people in all cultures despite its particular historical context of ancient Near Eastern culture. To understand the divine message one must pay the closest attention possible to the human words, neither presuming the meaning to be obvious nor forcing meaning into arbitrary harmonies or a preconceived theology.
3. Human, relational metaphors, rather than scientific or propositional statements aptly describe God's communication with his people and provide us with invaluable attitudes, approaches and analogies by which people can cope with contemporary problems in a Christian perspective.
