Becoming a Learning Person vs. "Gettin' yer mind right"

I'm all for learning what God says in the bible, listening to the Holy Spirit (who's our teacher; see John 14:26), and learning the cultural and historical setting for all those amazing stories. The whole purpose of that is to better appreciate God and appropriate his guidance and truth into our own lives.

But way too many people have turned the bible alone into a sort of rote Question-and-Answer workbook, with a kind of mean-spirited "THIS. IS. A. TEST." to "get your mind right" attitude. Kind of like in Cool Hand Luke:

But if you read the Gospels, you see dialog, real-world interaction with people and places who understood Jesus' allusions and references to Old Testament scriptures and contemporary Roman, Greek and Jewish cultures. You see tons of questions, and people looking for the right questions to ask. If you read Paul's letters to New Testament churches (Ephesians, Galatians, Corinthians, Phillippians, etc.) you see church-specific guidance coming from their first pastor, Paul.

Most of all, you see grace.

If you read the Old Testament books, you see stories of a particular community's interactions (many of them dysfunctional) with God. All of them give us useful and essential principles illustrated with numerous examples. (See Paul's comments to his protege Timothy, and us, in 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5.)

You don't see a systematic theology; that notion didn't come along until the Enlightenment, over 1600 years after the last books of the bible were written. You especially don't see a Q&A list. Call to "right living," certainly. But it's all by example, with a living Spirit involved. With Him in the game, we can learn to become learners, learn to seek and ask the right questions, find the answers, and in so doing become a kind of Living Word for other people. You don't have to get your mind right. Just invite God to transform your mind...like he said he would, at least if we let him. Now that's some good news.
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