Frederick Buechner -The Door Interview (extract) ………………….

BUECHNER: Well, I’ve never learned to talk about the Christian faith in the accustomed way. I’ve talked about it the only way I can. In some ways it has created a dilemma for me as a writer, because my religious books are too colloquial and too secular for church people, yet too churchy for secular people.

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DOOR: The Bible is very important in the evangelical church. There is a lot of discussion about the inerrancy issue. In your books, you seem to approach the Bible in a unique way. How do you read the Bible?

BUECHNER: How many ways are there to read the Bible? You can read it devotionally, and I suppose I do that somewhat, St. Paul especially. But I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a great Bible reader. I don’t sit down every day and read for an hour through the Bible. But I really do read it with a great deal of pleasure… which is the last thing I would have suspected. It’s fun to read. So I read it sometimes as a devotional, but really more, not for fun, but because it’s fascinating.

DOOR: Is the Bible truth?

BUECHNER: There is a wonderful piece by Karl Barth in a book called The Word of God, The Word of Man. He says that reading the Bible is like looking down from a building onto the street and seeing everyone looking up, pointing at something. Because of the way the window is situated, you can’t see what they’re seeing but you realize they are seeing something of extraordinary importance. That is what it is like to read the Bible. It’s full of people, all pointing up at some extraordinary event. All those different fingers are pointing at truth; all those different voices are babbling about truth in all the Bible’s different forms.

DOOR: But what is the truth the fingers are pointing at?

BUECHNER: Well, the truth has to do basically with the presence of God in history, the presence of God in the tangled history of Israel, of all places, and the tangled histories of us all. The truth is very hard to verbalize without making it sound like a platitude framed on a minister’s wall. It is a living truth in the sense that it is better experienced than explained. Not even the Bible can contain it finally, but only point to it.

DOOR: You mentioned in your book Wishful Thinking that reading the Bible as literature is like reading Moby Dick as a whaling manual. As evangelicals, our problem seems to be the opposite- an extreme literalism that reads the Bible as a whaling manual rather than literature.

BUECHNER: You can’t listen to some of the more blood-curdling psalms without feeling they’ve got something basically wrong. The one I always think of is Psalm 137:9, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” Something has gone wrong. That must be an imperfect expression of the majesty of God. But I would want to be very careful with the one who does take the Bible literally. We had a baby-sitter once who was very fundamentalistic. She became a Jehovah’s Witness later on. She would say to me, “Mr. Buechner, I will not allow my children to take the Salk vaccine because the Bible says you are not to eat blood, and everyone knows there is blood in the Salk vaccine. What do you think?” Part of me wanted to say that such a response was a travesty, and suggest that, of course, her children should have the Salk vaccine. But I always drew back from saying that, because I was afraid that if I destroyed that way of reading the Bible, I might destroy all sorts of other things. But I have always had the feeling that to take things literally may be closer to the truth than some of the more sophisticated ways of looking at the Bible. If you want to talk of being literally washed in the blood of the lamb, there is something in me that recoils from that. Yet, in another sense, I’d rather have that kind of language used as an expression of experience of Christ than whatever it might be watered down to.

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DOOR: Is the Bible primarily a book of rules, principles, and norms set down for us to follow?

BUECHNER: I don’t feel that. At least that’s not what I hear. To me, the most precious words of his are, “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden.” I can hardly speak those words without getting a lump in my throat. It is as though the Jesus that comes through to me is less a lawgiver, for all his giving of laws, than a speaker of a stern and loving word. What I hear is his great openness. What I experience is the opening up of a whole new range of possibilities. Jesus has the invitation. He’s the inviter, the opener of doors. Falling back on biblical images, he opens the door, and a light floods through that you never dreamed possible.

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DOOR: You are invited to speak to ministers a great deal. What do you tell them?

BUECHNER: I tell them that a minister has only two stories to tell. One is the story of Jesus. The other is his own story. Most ministers don’t dare tell their own stories- the ups and downs, the darks and lights. In a sense, the two stories are the same story. The parallels are not exact… Jesus is tempted and resists; we are tempted and don’t resist. Of course, all ministers draw some stories from their lives- what somebody said or something that happened, but I mean more than that. If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth (which doesn’t mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are.) Many ministers agree that this is the way they should bear witness to their faith, but instead of drawing on their lives for truth, they draw on it only for anecdote.

————————————————————————– — —- from The Door Interviews, ed. by Mike Yaconelli

Full text at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/1870/frameindex.html