I have called my blog Countermelodies because I tend to think of things in dialectic tensions. I am also a musician and I experience the tensions of counterpoint as the real driving force behind music. Without dissonance, music would not have motion, it would not have color, and indeed it would not be music. Would it not drive you crazy to listen to a single tone frequency for any length of time? Even that single tone frequency is dissonant in a way because it is a vibration, the equilibrium of the medium that it passes through is disturbed. Consonance is a matter of perception. Beauty is in the eye, or ear, of the beholder.

     Human discourse is like music. The same could be said about human thought. Many different tunes go on all at once. Sometimes they react with one another and occasionally they match in perfect unison. Our inherent epistemology, how we think we know what we know, is constantly being challenged by forces external and internal to ourselves. So even my own far flinging flights of philosophical fancy stand on shaky soil at best, even if I have an academic to support my arguments. The post-modern in me wants to say that nothing can truly be know about anything, but the enlightenment thinker wants to believe that there is a rational explanation for everything that happens. My faith tells me to trust that God will make everything known in time and that all of this human speculation is ultimately pointless. The world tells me to stop thinking so much and get a real job.

     My mind constantly considers tensions. I get stuck on those difficult passages of scripture and am skeptical of the hermeneutic jumping jacks that commentators do to try to explain them. Interpreting ancient texts is probably the most difficult job that anyone has ever thought of, but our culture seems to value it, and indeed needs talented people to do it. Yet, here is another tension, the traditional Brethren in me says that the Bible contains a "plain sense" that can easily be understood and obeyed by anyone, regardless of educational level. Lord, I wish it were that easy. We try to balance this view by saying that these texts must be read and interpreted in the community, but that line where the community becomes god to us is almost invisible. The best that we can hope for is that we all read through eyes of faith and that God will forgive our collective errors. God help us all if there is only one true way to think about and to read scripture.

     Well, if you made it this far into my ramblings maybe you share some of my struggles and frustrations. I want to treat the Bible as something wholly other, a text to be revered and honored above all else and yet something to be feared because it is indeed a dangerous book. God spoke, and people had the audacity to write it down, as if mortals could truly understand and obey the Almighty. Jesus came as God incarnate and people still thought that they could capture that special revelation in blots of ink on parchment and papyrus. Yet even if we take our imperfect attempts at translating the copies of copies of copies that we have literally, the Bible still has the power to cause you to lose your life in order to take it up for real in the name of Jesus. You could end up giving away all of your possessions and actually love your enemies.

     I just don't know how to begin to describe my hermeneutic approach or my specific style of biblical criticism. I cannot say that I trust the text, but neither do I consider it worthless. I like to have some background on the context that it was written in, but many texts have been shaped over decades and even centuries, including their sources of oral tradition. The words have power, and they contain life, but they also cause pain and suffering to people on the margins. I want to consider these readers when I am interpreting a text. The text has problems, riddles, and confusions. I have problems, riddles, and confusions. The reacting countermelodies that we call the text and the reacting countermelodies that I call I both exist in a broken and fallen world. Maybe we need to pray to Jesus for the salvation of the Bible.