OK, yes, the fact that Christians can at least agree on Jesus is a good thing. In fact, along those lines, let me say that there seems to a new movement brewing among many evangelicals. That is, a significant number of folk who share what we would usually term a literalist approach to scripture and a fundamentalist theology are beginning to come together and say publically that not all of them are as socially conservative as their more politcally active representatives might usually portray. More and more evangelicals are taking a "green" approach to environmental issues and beginning to ask very hard questions about lesbian/gay partnerships. I, for one, having been raised in just this branch of the Christian faith, view all of this with great interest and even a bit of hope that the Spirit might be, once again, doing something very new and potentially very powerful.
That said, some folk on this thread have raised the old hermeneutical issue of how we read scripture. As I hinted above, I have seldom found e-mail, message boards, or even chat rooms an effective forum for this sort of discussion. It is just too complex. Now, if I could get you in one of my classes, that's a whole different story. I haven't had a student yet who, when presented with the real goods on Jesus, God, and reading scripture, hasn't come around, though many have done just that dragging their minds and hearts every step of the way, because it's so different from what they've been taught.
Again, there's no way to really do this topic justice, but here are some first principles.
1. Jesus was not a fundamentalist or a literalist. If you track Jesus' interpretation of scripture at any point in the New Testament (see particularly the Sermon on the Mount, but also at any point when the religious authorities are trying to trap him with literalistic interpretations of Hebrew scripture), you will see that Jesus had an amazing - even scandolous - freedom with respect to how he interpreted and applied the sacred sayings that the Hebrew people had collected and preserved for thousands of years. Jesus never negated the texts, but he found ways to breathe new life into them, he found life in them. Wow.
2. The "Bible" is not one book. It is a collection of sacred texts that have been preserved by a wide variety of faith communities over thousands of years and the voices in those very different texts do, indeed, disagree with one another on matters of faith, early and often. In fact, the REAL glory of the Christian faith is not that we have a text that was "dictated" through us, but rather that the Church took the amazing DIVERSITY of these texts, collected them all together, and called them ALL sacred. Wow.
3. We all interpret sacred scripture through our own lenses. A funadamenlist hermeneutic is just that - an intellectual construct external to the text that acts as lens through which its adherents interpret all scripture. That is, fundamentalist theologians accept and teach certain prinicples and then use those principles, when they can find them in scripture, to self-authenticate their interpretation. They could, if they were inclined, find an equal or greater number of texts which disproved or at least challenged their reading frame.
4. The hermeneutic I find most consistently life giving is a Christocentric one. Luther, Paul, and many other theoolgians have used it to great effect and I've found the same. That is, I ask of all scripture: does it preach, communicate, and express Christ, crucified and risen? That is, does it free us from our fears, and set us free for new and abundant life. I ask this same question of even Hebrew scripture, as quesitonable as that might sound, because you can see by the way the question is framed that Christ doesn't really need to show up in the text. However, what the text needs to do is what Christ did: set us free.
5. Human freedom and Human responsibility (in light of that freedom) are the heart of a Christocentric faith. Everything else is a warping of the one, true faith. Unfortunately, there are more, these days, who are raised in the warped faith then in the true faith.
There is so much more that might be said, but now I have to run to the chiropracter.
