Making Sense of the Bible

The Bible is a book for the future, about the future, and written with confidence in the future. It embraces the future not out of disgust with the present or with the past but out of the conviction that God is in the future, and to be where God is, is to know fulfillment, purpose, and bliss. Who should be satisfied with anything less than that? Recovering the lost vision for America may mean recovering God’s vision for a future society of equity, love, and peace, a society rich with change and destined for a world we have not yet known. Making sense of the Bible has been an American cultural preoccupation now for nearly four hundred years. We are neither righteous Israel nor decadent Rome. We are, however, a needy nation, as needy of God and of one another as we have ever been. Perhaps this bottoming out of our experience will make us less arrogant, less certain of our Manifest Destiny, more desirous of being transformed, and less willing to conform. The Bible is not a therapy program nor is it a human success story, a moral tale with an inevitably happy ending. It is the account of a faithless people and a faithful God who seek constantly to renew their relationship each with the other.

– from The Good Book, by Peter J. Gomes (1942–2011)