by Marcel Măcelaru
It is often said that biblical awareness is increasingly declining in Europe, while it still shines powerfully in the global South. This situation, some propose, has to do with the fact that stories of pain, poverty, war and illness, as well as many of the social and religious customs and rituals recorded in the Bible, are analogous to life experiences Christians in the South have and Christians in the North lack. I believe however that the issue to ponder is not whether the Bible still speaks relevantly to people in Europe today, but rather how the Bible can lead one to true Christian existence.
To explain, I grew up in a Christian family, in Romania, where I learned from an early age that the Bible is ‘the word of God from cover to cover’. This inevitably meant that I had to handle the Bible with care, always with clean hands and preferably reading it in a pious position. I was also repeatedly warned to neither ‘add’ nor ‘take away’ from its words – evidently an allusion to Revelation 22:18-19, which in my context was interpreted as a reference to the integrity and ultimate authority of the Protestant canon. It never occurred to me during those years that the ‘relationship’ one has with the Bible can, and ought to be, much more than that.
I submit however that the impact of the Bible in the life of the believer is fully realised when a move from ‘reading about’ to ‘participation in’ the story the Bible tells, which is God’s story with the world, is made. Such participation is made possible when the re-telling of the biblical story is done in ways that provide people and communities with new models of action, meaning and values. Such an objective requires a mode of invocation within which the world evoked by the Bible is re- enacted in our world; for it is only through such re-enactment that the story being told becomes the ‘sacred space’ within which the individual or the community exists. Only through such re-enactment can the story being told become the story being lived.
Admittedly, alternative definitions of Christian existence are available and in use. For some, this has to do with institutions and structured religion. For others, with doctrine or customs and rituals. Nevertheless, I argue that these do not suffice. Affiliation to a certain religious organization cannot be taken as proof of one’s Christian commitment, doctrines vary and the rituals performed by believers are as many as the people performing them. In other words, outward characteristics and practices alone are inadequate as depictions of true Christian commitment. In fact, Europe itself is a clear case in point. With a few exceptions, a genuinely Christian ethos is hardly the norm in our communities; and this in spite of all the Christian elements (institutions and practices) that are still prominent, and the centuries-old history of Church-State symbioses which make up the unique Christian hegemony that gave our Vieux Continent the label of ‘Christendom’.
The alternative I propose presupposes a participative stance. Practically speaking, the re-enactment mentioned above is about living in the here and now according to the principles of the world the Bible evokes. It is about embracing a Christian mode of existence. It is about belief in and worship of God as he is known in Jesus Christ. Participation in God’s Story is about identification of, and involvement with, God’s redemptive activity in the world today.
This leads to the conclusion that the Bible should not only be read but also proclaimed. And that such proclamation is more than the mere speaking of the truth of the gospel. Effective proclamation, in the context of today’s Europe, is about living that truth faithfully. In this way, the resulting mode of existence will also be a demonstration of the divine plan for humanity. This, I propose, is a much-needed ‘counter-measure’ to the emergence and persistence of modes of existence that foster exclusion and enmity, selfishness and injustice, falsehood and disbelief. It is only by promoting familiarity with the Bible within our communities that a mode of existence as participation in God’s story becomes attainable. And it is only through such participation that God’s purposes for the creation are activated, within us, and through us for the world.
Marcel Măcelaru is a Professor of Theology at the „Aurel Vlaicu” University of Arad in Romania and a Member of the EEA Board.
