what the Bible is

I read Flunking Sainthood by Jana Riess some months ago. I was going back through my Kindle highlights and found this passage where she quotes Debbie Blue. It really resonates with me.

The Bible isn’t really at all good at being an instruction manual. It’s good at leading us into a tangle of wild poetry, heartbreaking stories, contradictions, twists and turns, the concrete struggles of a vast array of unruly, disparate human beings being sought after by God. . . . The Bible isn’t a cage that contains God, making God available to take out or hang in our living room, it’s a witness to the fecund, ungraspable Other (and our relationship to that Other).

“… it’s a witness to the fecund, ungraspable Other (and our relationship to that Other).” Wow! We could profoundly transform our relationship to our church, our religion, and to each other by taking this to heart.