Talk me through the Bible

One of the hardest things to do for most Christians is to talk to those who are not Christian about their faith or practice.

For example. Could you give a secular friend a quick statement (an 'elevator' statement) as to why you read the Bible, or think the Bible is important?

Moreover, could you do it in non-churchy language; language and terms that a secular person would understand and be familiar with?

I thought about this while watching a video where Jordan Peterson sets out what he sees as the importance of the Bible.

My quick thoughts about my own approach might be something like:

The Bible is a very subtle, cohesive collection of documents that exposes and then resolves the human condition. And that condition? Mankind's rebellion against the world in which he finds himself!

That is, we fight continually against the existential discontinuities of suffering, tyranny, frustration and death, and without hope.

We have a vain and forlorn desire for liberty, peace, love and joy. Yet the world embeds only fleeting glimpses of these, sparkling points of light in a fog of grey disquiet.

All religions seek to give humanity a credible location that does justice to their obvious personhood in an ostensibly mute cosmos. They have this quest, just as all philosophy quests for understanding our experience of the world, but all except Christianity make the quest within the world, either by nugatizing or floccinaucinihilipilificating it (claiming that the material is imaginary) or by accepting it and 'worshiping' it: paganism and modern materialism. Thus is their collective failure because they don't really deal with the dilemma of mankind and his despair or his nobility and grasp of inherent purpose.

The Bible does. It sets out the resolution through the creator resolving it himself. The resolution cannot come from disregarding the world (because you remain in it), or from within it (because that just feeds the problem). This cannot be from within the world that only produces death, but from the life-giver, from outside this world. It's creator!

A transcript of Peterson is linked.