Destinations and directions

 What I mean by a destination is a static condition, a plateau, the state of being where you have arrived and no longer need to press on.

What I mean by direction is a dynamic condition, a pathway, where you are travelling towards what you seek but the terrain alters as you go. There may be obstacles to go round, you may have to retrace your steps and try a different route; the direction of travel is an education of itself and a continually changing and evolving state of being.

I was mainly discipled to see the Christian faith as a destination, a fixed condition that was more like a home to live in than a road to walk along. The Bible was viewed similarly by those who taught me. 

So preachers and teachers would say "The Bible says..." or "The Bible teaches..." about such issues as authority, women in the church, marriage, parenting, financial giving, how to dress, and other similar topics of social importance.

The usual method was to take a proof text, and extrapolate from that a fixed governing principle. So, for instance, I'd receive the teaching to "Honour your father and thy mother so that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you." Or, "A woman must not wear men’s clothing, and a man must not wear women’s clothing, for whoever does these things is detestable to the Lord your God." And such texts (and many others) were referenced and quoted as abidingly true because they are in the Bible and the Bible is our book of truth.

But then I gradually realised as I studied the Bible more, that it is essentially the book of a travelling people, not a settled and static people. Its truth does indeed abide, but it also develops. It's not so much like a building that once completed remains the same, it's more like a tree that starts as a sapling and changes in form as it matures.

So, for instance, people often say the Bible teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman for life. But that isn't quite right. The Bible has righteous and holy men in it who have many concubines and several wives, have sexual relations with their wives' slaves to procure a child for inheritance, and in no way are these scenarios presented as sinful.

Or if we consider the Bible teaching about women not wearing men's clothes; that is taken to mean women should wear skirts and men should wear trousers — but how do we apply the rule in a time when women's trouser have come into existence? 

There are developments and transformations in the Bible; for instance there's the Binding of Isaac, which seems to me to be a way of embedding in the oral tradition (and I'm not saying it didn't happen) that the old Canaanite practice of child sacrifice is something we are leaving behind; or there's the occasion when Jesus's mother and brother come to claim his attention and send word that they are outside (to section him, actually) — looking round he says asks who are his mother and his brothers, and avers that the gathered listeners are his mother and brothers (so munch for 'honour thy father and thy mother); or there's the time in the Book of Acts when Peter has a vision from God telling him to move on from the dietary laws of the books of Moses, that it's now okay to eat as the Gentiles do. 

I (and you too, no doubt) could fill a whole book with the detail of how practice changes and develops while the underlying biblical principles hold fast, because practice walks on two feet — the abiding holy truth of scripture and the constantly evolving terrain of circumstance.

The helpful thing is to absorb and trace the journey of the people of God through the unfolding scriptural story — for instance, trace from the books of the Law teaching that a women be stoned to death for adultery clear through to Jesus putting a stop to that by saying "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." We learn from this that we start out with the revelation that adultery is something God seriously doesn't like, but we journey on to a more constructive response to it, lifting away the violence, giving people the chance to start again.

The dependable truth is in the whole story, not in the proof text. It's revealed by the path the people walk, by their direction of travel.

I was thinking once more about this question of destination versus direction today as I was listening to a man who aspires to one-bag minimalism talking on YouTube. He's not yet where he wants to be, he still has a hundred or so possessions, and it's taken him a number of years to arrive at where he is now from where he started out with a normal houseful of stuff. He wants the freedom, he wants the flexibility; and he sees that with patience and perseverance he will keep going through several milestones, always moving on with his sights set on simplicity and freedom. The destination isn't wholly clear, but the next stretch of the road is.

One of the reasons I love minimalism is that it is all about freedom and choice, and I see a strong focus on freedom in the New Testament, and I see that choice is fundamental to Christian discipleship.

If you picture in your mind a child's see-saw (I think they have a different name in the US) — 

On that see-saw, in the life of every one of us, possessions sit on one side and options sit on the other. That doesn't make it wrong to have possessions, it just means that the more you have the fewer options you will have. Inevitably.

In my own life I have reached a place of inching slowly forward, trying to get the balance right, optimising freedom and choice without letting go of practicality.

I remember that Jesus observed, "No one can follow me unless he gives up everything he has." And I can't help noticing that owning nothing was essential to the life he lived and what he was able to achieve. At the same time, I recognise that (like all one-bag minimalist nomads) he relied on someone else having a house and offering shelter and putting food on the table for his benefit. Simon Peter's mother-in-law, for instance. Simplicity as a way of life is complex and connected — simplicity with responsibility is the direction of travel, and that passes through changing terrain. Like a tree, like a river, like anything organic and alive, it looks different in different seasons and takes on new forms as the landscape changes. Even the River Thames is somewhere a mountain spring, and a great oak nourished by its own falling leaves will use the vitality to reclothe itself at the end of the winter.