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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (May 23, 1963)
Religion in America Bible Said To Bring Personal Message If Studied Properly Br LOUIS CASSELS UPI Correspondent A pastor once startled his congregation by asking: "How many of you would like to receive a personal mes sage from God to guide you in dealing with your prob lems and help you make sense out of life?" After some hesitation, near ly every hand was raised. "Very well," said the pas tor. "1'H tell you where you can find such a message." i He reached into the pulpit and heid up a Bible. "You may have to read this book fairly extensively before you encounter the message that is addressed especially to , you," he said. 1 "But I can guarantee that ' i! you read it faithfully, God will speak to you through it, just as genuinely and person ally as if He had sent you a telegram." Basic Fact That pastor was neither a fanatic nor a fundamentalist. He was trying to communi cate a basic fact of Christian experience, on which there is a striking degree of agree ment among liberals and con servatives, Protestants and Catholics, a n c i e n t church lathers and modern theolo- ; gians. ' "The Bible not only tells us how God sought His people in the past; it is also a means by which He seeks us out today," nays Prof. Robert McAfee Brown of Stanford University. "Not only are God's demands and promises brought home to us, but God Himself speaks to us as we take the Bible seriously. It is for this rea son that we speak of the Bi ble as 'the word of God. Have No Answer - Why God the Holy Spirit should choose to communicate with men through the pages of the anciant book which con tains a little bit of every thing, from authentic history to folk myths and from sub lime hymns of praise to pas sionately erotic love poems, is a question that Christians cannot answer. They can only affirm that it happens, and invite skeptics to try for themselves whether it be so. Some people unfortunately try to reduce the great mys tery to an absurd kind of magic. They open the Bible at random, stab their fingers at a verse, and expect there in to find God's instant "an swer" to whatever is trou bling them at that moment. The notion that divine guid ance is dispensed in such a mechanical, penny-in-the-slot manner is an insult to God and puts the Bible on a par with a ouija board. Less blasphemous, but equally ineffective, is the cas ual kind of "Scripture-nibbling" in which the reader jumps around from one part of the Bible to another, with out plan or purpose, reading perhaps a psalm tonight, a chapter from one of the Gos pels tomorrow night, and one of St. Paul's letters next week or next month. Must Be Studied Dr. Frederick C. Grant, a leading Biblical scholar of the Episcopal Church, says that those who would hear "the voice of the Lord speaking through the Scriptures" must be willing not merely to read that Bible, but to study it, seriously and systematically. "We are frequently advised to read the Bible with our own personal needs in mind, and to look for answers to our private questions," says Dr. Grant. "This is good as far it goes ... but better still is the advice to study the Bible ob jectively, and write down what it teaches, summarizing the thought in our own lan guage but without regard first of all to our own sub jective needs. "Let the great passages fix themselves in our memory. Let them stay there perma nently like bright beacons, launching their powerful shafts of light upon life's problems our own and everyone's as they illumine new ones, now another dark area of human life. This we should do first, making sure that the meaning we derive from the text is the one that Is really there and not our private wishful substitute. "Following such a method, we discover that the Bible does 'speak to our condition' and meet our needs, not just occasionally, or when some emergency arises, but contin ually." The foregoing advice is from Dr. Grant s superb little book, "How to Read the Bi ble," which is now available In a Collier paperback (at 95 cents). Hulteng Named To Alumni Honors List Eu;?ne John L. Hulteng, dean of the University of Ore gon school of journalism, has been named to an honors list for distinguished alumni of Columbia university's gradu ate school of journalism. The honors list was chosen from names submitted by alumni-at-large and approved by the 50th nniversary com mittee of the graduate school of journalism. . Medford Tribune SECTION B MEDFORD. OREGON, THURSDAY. 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