The phenomentalist, reads the parable and finds herself addressed by it. Though she realizes that it may have a historical context, what matters is what it says to her today. This account fits to some extent bot the fundamentalist and the deconstructionist. What cannot be done with this sort of reading, however, it to claim any normativity for it: just because the text says this to ME, there is no reason why it should say it to YOU. If we are not careful, the claim ‘this parable speaks of Jesus dying for me’ will collapse into statements of no more public significance than ‘I like salt’ or ‘I like Sibelius’. The phenomentalist purchases the apparent certainty and security of her statements in relation to the text at the high cost of forfeiting public relevance.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.66
When we take the gospel, or anything God speaks to us in the scriptures and wrap it in highly personal language, then we make it more meaningful to us. It increases the potency of the language.
Say you grew up listening to God spoke of in a way that made him seem a harsh and distant ruler. Then you come to college and you hear the Gospel preached, but with phrases like “God is crazy about you. Give him your heart and he will tenderly embrace you, ugliness and all. He is passionate about loving and resuing you.” And that strikes a chord with you that eventually leads to your choice to follow the Lord.
OK. Then you go on talking about God that way to everyone around you. After all, it’s what made the most sence to you. The things you read in the Bible seem a stiff shell surrounding the much more personal Jesus that you feel. So this is the story you tell.
There’s a problem though. The more personal you make Bible, the less relevant it is to the public. That is, the LESS potent you may be making the message for the next guy. He may not ‘get’ the gospel, filtered through the experience you had. I’m not discounting your experience one bit, but the more you stray from describing things the way Jesus, the apostles and prophets did, the more you are not actually communicating the same thing at all.
I wish I could come up with some better examples right now.
This can go other directions too: Clothing the Bible in very patriarchal language. This appeals to guys (typically trying to grow a beard) who wish they were patriarchs. That stuff is all in there, but when that’s what you talk about most of the time, then the story in the Bible has been personalized. The price you pay for this is the loss of the power of the gospel to the world in general.
That other guy you know who you wish would turn his back on the world and follow Jesus? You try to tell him the gospel, but you’re telling him the version that fit into your story. Without realizing it, you’ve tossed out half the goods. And it turns out those were some of the goods he needed.
This has got to be one angle on why there are so many groups and factions in Christianity. We all have the same orthodoxy, the same Bible. But my amping up certain parts of it, we make it more appealing to some (us) and less appealing to others (those guys). And these go quite a bit beyond theological debates and into our all elements of culture, class, geography, etc.
Darn, this is going to take a lot more work to articulate accurately. I wish I knew the Bible better.