Word: faithfully
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most ambitious Bible-study class ever to air on nationally broadcast television: a two-month series called Genesis: A Living Conversation, with Bill Moyers as host. Each of its 10 weekly episodes features a diverse panel grappling with the majestic, infuriating work, engaging both the stupendous acts of faith that inspired Fintel and the moral and ethical zig-zags that bedeviled Rabbi Visotzky. At the same time, a batch of new books, written, for the most part, by Living Conversation panelists, amounts to a modest but unmistakable Genesis revival in American culture. Says Robert Alter, whose masterly new translation...
...issues hinging on the character of both God and the patriarchs. More so than Jesus in the New Testament or even Jehovah in much of the rest of the Old, the Genesis God works in ways that many analysts, especially those willing to test the boundaries of conventional faith, find mysterious in the most profound and troubling sense. Jack Miles, author of the arresting God: A Biography, has written, "Much that the Bible says about him is rarely preached from the pulpit because, examined too closely, it becomes a scandal." By way of proof Miles cites the Flood in Genesis...
...unruly story lines did not go unremarked upon by early ecclesiastics trying to create systems of Scripture-based faith. St. Jerome, who translated the Word from Hebrew into Latin, grumbled that many of the narratives were "rude and repellent." A medieval rabbi, borrowing an image from the story of Noah's drunken disarray after the Flood (9: 21), suggested that "as dutiful children, let us cover the nakedness of our fathers in the cloak of favorable interpretation." Something of the sort eventually occurred. The Christian church developed a set of interpretations according to which the patriarchs prefigure Christians as heroes...
...long personal journey from the Southern Baptist ministry into which he was ordained in 1954 to the far more liberal United Church of Christ. "I've had the experience of God," he says. "But there's a lot about God I don't understand and a lot about faith that I wrestle with. Faith is too hard. It creates too many conflicts. I think if I myself could do it over again I'd be a man of no faith." There are moments in his usually masterful moderation of the telecasts when that ambivalence seems to express itself more clearly...
...missing something: "I wondered about the God dimension of the stories." Her panel dwelled on the tales' human characters and on their structure--on everything, in fact, but the Being she understands as their center. "It was a postmodernist conversation," she suggests. "It probably is not very reflective of faith as it is lived out by the majority of adherents...