The Bible Is Strange... and Our Most Treasured Book

It is strange that the Bible is our most treasured book, and yet it seems so difficult that we don't find it very helpful. Perhaps we have expected the wrong things from it; we have asked of it what it cannot do. We have expected the Bible to keep promises that it has never made to us. The Bible cannot be a good luck piece to bring God's blessing. Nor can it be an answer book to solve our problems or to give us right belief.

It [the Bible] is... strange because it does not accommodate our conventional language, images, or presuppositions. Rather, the Bible offers to us a way of perceiving reality which is very different from our usual forms of thought and speech. It requires of us a serious revamping of the way we think, speak, see, and live. It draws us into another history which is at odds with the public history commonly embraced by us. It also promises to us different gifts and demands. That fresh perspective concerns not just the church as a separate believing community but as a vision of a new humanity in his new creation. The Bible is keenly pertinent to our contemporary "crisis of the human spirit." The Bible provides hints of an alternative notion of what our humanness is, human in history, human in covenant.
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Walter Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense, p. 9. 26.