Making sense of the Bible

I like the saying about a follower of Jesus Christ reading the bible on one knee while on the other he had an open newspaper. The bible should be read in dialogue with the news of the world. From my youth I always believed that the Bible to be the Word of God, carrying his authority and I read it avidly together with many books on Christian doctrine. When I was a university student, unknown to me, I came under Dutch Reformed influence. Louis Berkhof’s “Systematic Theology” shaped my ideas about the bible and what it taught. I also recall hearing Klaas Runia defend the bible as the Word of God and not that which merely became the Word of God. I interpreted the bible in a kind of prescriptive manner. I saw it as a handbook of Christian doctrine and prescribed about creation, sin, Christ, salvation and judgement. The way that I read the bible changed, however, after I served as a minister for twelve years on a Glasgow housing estate and now for sixteen years in the centre of Rotterdam. The conditions and problems that people faced need to be taken seriously and not quickly dismissed as the effects of human sin and divine judgement. I think it was when I was in Glasgow preaching through Nehemiah that I realised that the bible could be interpreted descriptively. I used to interpret as a story of spiritual leadership of Nehemiah or the spiritual renewal of God’s people. Without denying these, I began to see new things such as the people left behind. Chapter two contains a long list of difficult names? Who were they? Why were they so depressed? Then I realised that this was the situation with the majority of the 25,000 people on the housing estate who had missed out and were unemployed. There is renewal in Nehemiah but it does not come until chapter nine and there are lots of conflicts to face in between – just like human life you might say! The descriptive approach recognises that the bible is more than prescriptive but actually describes human experience. To read the bible descriptively is see it more like a mirror of human life than simply a book of doctrine. I began to see that all of the spiritual heroes had feet of clay. Every family in the Old Testament would in contemporary terms need to be assigned a social worker. I found the bible had a lot to say about unemployment and poverty in Glasgow and about migration and welcoming aliens in Rotterdam. This is how I came to discover Jesus Christ in Glasgow as the urban Saviour and in Rotterdam as the universal Saviour.

Housing Estates and Hope

Last Sunday I preached in a housing area of 37.000 people on the outskirts of Budapest. It reminded me of the twelve years we lived on an estate in Glasgow before moving to Rotterdam. What had been a small village had become a huge housing area near the airport and home for some of the poorest in the city including many Roma people (Gypsies). Budapest is a city of over two million people. The increase of population has been mostly contained in these housing areas. It is encouraging that the Hungarian Reformed church is giving more attention to them. It was good to meet again my friends Eszter Dani and Otto Pescuk in that congregation of about two hundred people.

In 1983 Lesley-Ann and I came to live on a housing estate with our two week old son. Drumchapel was on the north-west edge of Glasgow and referred to as a peripheral housing estate. The population of 25,000 (once about 40,0000) had experienced large unemployment after the downturn in the shipping and engineering industries. I am not proud to admit that as a Church of Scotland minister it took me four years to see what was in front of me and to shape my ministry around it. There were three giant tower blocks in the middle of our parish. These were the days when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the churches and voluntary groups co-operated to develop the community with government-aid funds. We began to build a community development corporation that employed and served local people.

Housing estates are a feature of some parts of Europe. In the United Kingdom they were built after the war to house people relocated from the inner-city. In Glasgow the people of Govan were promised a house in the country with an inside toilet and front and back door. Other big cities like London, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and Belfast have housing estates that became socially and economically challenged. In the Netherlands the distinctive integrated policy of urban planning has avoided these excesses but in central and eastern Europe the story is not a happy one. I remember visiting possibly the largest housing estate in Europe which four metro-stations long in the south of Prague. In 1998 I visited Romania and became familiar with the faceless housing blocks put up by the dictator Ceaucescu for military personnel. These housing areas are cheap to live in for many refugees and Roma people.

This week I was reminded that these people deserve something better. On Friday I lost my wallet and believed it to have been stolen. Late that night I received a telephone call from the director of a social work project called ‘Job Score’ in the city. He told me how one young man, an undocumented migrant from Burundi, had found the wallet and handed it to him. I was surprised that no money or cards had been taken. I almost wished that he would have the few euros for returning it. The next day I visited to thank him and met him and his partner and two children. I could not help notice the scar on his face. He told me that the government has said he can only stay here for one more month as they believe it is safe for him to return to his own country. I do not believe that to be true and nor does the Dutchman director of the project. My friend Andrew Gardener (the Church of Scotland minister in Brussels) and I were astonished at the grace and gentleness of this man whose life is clearly at risk.  

(The photographs which portray the housing blocks and shopping centre in Drumchapel, Glasgow, were taken five years ago.)