Author's Preface
God's Healing
Strategy
When I became a Christian at age
seventeen, I experienced an immediate change in my
relationship with the Bible. What had been a puzzle
became a source of practical wisdom, an encouragement for
faithful living, and a constant source of intellectual
stimulation. In the nearly thirty years since, I have
never ceased to be interested in the Bible. And I have
always found in the Bible a challenge to the commonplaces
and easy assumptions which most of us in North America,
all too wealthy and comfortable, tend to find ourselves
settling into.
As a young Christian, I thirsted for
help in understanding the Bible. I was blessed with many
friends who shared such thirst, not least the woman who
became my wife and continuing partner in discerning and
applying the Bible’s message, Kathleen Temple. Our
early passion for this task continues—and is
expressed in our constant conversing about biblical
themes.
also was blessed to discover numerous
written resources. Two monthly periodicals always
chock-full of stimulating biblically-oriented writings, Sojourners
and The Other Side, served as my mentors. They
introduced me to such insightful biblical interpreters as
John Howard Yoder, Jacques Ellul, William Stringfellow,
Dorothy Day, and many others.
A third blessing, along with friends
and reading materials, came later. Kathleen and I
discovered the Mennonite Church, learned to know
Mennonites in our Eugene, Oregon, home community, and
took the opportunity to spend a year at the Associated
Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. Surely
the 1980-1981 school year was the most exciting ever
experienced at AMBS!
Our teachers were superb. I learned the
Bible from Willard Swartley, John Howard Yoder, Millard
Lind, and Gertrude Roten. Our fellow-students were even
better. We made numerous lifetime friends and experienced
amazing hospitality, given our marginal status as
“Mennonite walk-ons.” An added blessing that
year was an impressive roster of guest speakers who
visited campus, including Krister Stendahl, Phyllis
Trible, James McClendon, Tony Campolo, Allan Boesak, and
James Cone.
Our time at AMBS convinced Kathleen and
me to formalize our relationship with Mennonites by
joining the Mennonite Church. Almost accidentally, I soon
found myself pastoring, first as a Eugene Mennonite
Church interim pastor. In the years that followed, my
biblical education took the form of sermon preparation. I
discovered that preaching provides a unique opportunity
for thinking through the message of the Bible.
In a moment of inspiration (or beginner’s
foolishness) I decided to begin my preaching career as a
Mennonite minister with an extended series on the Book of
Revelation. My kind friends in the Eugene congregation
spoke words of affirmation, so I took the next step of
submitting versions of my sermons as articles to the
Mennonite Church weekly magazine, the Gospel Herald.
Editor Daniel Hertzler accepted my articles—an act
of generosity for which I still am deeply grateful.
The series of seven articles helped
open several doors for me. These included my second
pastoral assignment (interim pastor at Trinity Mennonite
Church in Glendale, Arizona) and the opportunity to
publish my first book, Triumph of the Lamb: A Study
Guide to the Book of Revelation (Herald Press,
1987).
My approach to Revelation, summarized
briefly in chapter 13 below, reflected my application of
the approach to the Bible I had learned from my teachers.
I tried to take seriously the original historical setting
for Revelation but asked from the very beginning what
this book has to say to us today, particularly in terms
of our Christian vocation to follow Jesus’ peaceable
way.
When we returned to Eugene in 1987, and
I began pastoring there on a permanent basis, I embarked
on several long-running preaching series on sections of
the Bible. Probably the most interesting series for me
was a year-long treatment of key texts in the Old
Testament. Again I took seriously the historical setting
of the passages I preached on but also focused on the
relevance of these parts of the Bible for Christian
discipleship. I continued the same approach when we moved
on to Salem Mennonite Church near Freeman, South Dakota.
Then I began teaching at Eastern
Mennonite University in fall 1996. My very first class
(meeting at 8:00 a.m .the first day of school!) was Faith
and Christian Heritage, a historical introduction to
Christian faith. The first third of this class dealt with
the Bible. I drew on my sermons to put together class
lectures.
God’s Healing Strategy is
a revision of those sermons and lectures. My goal is to
introduce the message of the Bible—which I continue
to believe is a message of God’s love and human
responsibility to live lives which reflect that love. I
hope this brief book may open for readers a door to much
deeper and more comprehensive engagement with the Bible.
I have included an extensive list of
reading resources I have found helpful over the years.
Recognizing the importance of communal interaction in
discerning and applying the Bible’s message, I have
also included at the end of each chapter some questions
for reflection and discussion
This book is small but my list of debts
large. I am grateful to my teachers—in the classroom
and on the written page. I am even more grateful to the
three congregations which provided contexts for my
preaching ministry and to Eastern Mennonite University
for providing the setting for my teaching ministry.
In each of these situations I have been
blessed with friends who continually confirm to me the
wisdom of Kathleen’s and my choice to become part of
the Mennonite Church. Another such friend is Michael A.
King, publisher, pastor, writer, conversation partner. I
am grateful to Michael for taking on this project through
Pandora Press U.S. Kathleen, eagerly, and our son Johan,
not always so eagerly, also have been and continue to be
wonderful conversation partners in things of the Spirit.
A word yet about my mother. As a child,
I was always encouraged to think for myself. I don’t
remember our family spending a lot of time with the
Bible, though we were certainly taught to respect it. In
any case, the guidance I received from my parents was
largely unspoken, modeling more than lecturing.
Only as an adult did I sit down with my
mother and talk much about the Bible. In her retirement,
she became a Bible study leader and enjoyed talking with
her theologian son about what each of us was learning.
Through these conversations, though, I realized that I
had learned my basic approach to the Bible from her years
ago, even without her overtly articulating it. That is, I
had learned from her that nothing matters as much as
love—and that love provides the context for
understanding everything that is worth knowing in life.
My first book was published shortly
after my father’s death. It was bittersweet to
dedicate it to his memory—I would have much
preferred him to have seen the book itself. So, when I
first began making plans with Michael King for publishing
this, my second book, I felt happy that I could dedicate
it to my mother and give it to her to enjoy. Sadly, this
was not to be. She died suddenly and unexpectedly of
heart failure a little over a year ago. So once again, I
have the bittersweet privilege of dedicating a book to a
recently deceased parent. I hope that in some small way,
this book will help others know the love of God reflected
to me through the lives of my parents.
Ted Grimsrud
Harrisonburg, Virginia
God's Healing Strategy
orders:
|
