Out of date?

I travel to work on a tiny rail branch-line whose existence is constantly under threat.

This means that ticket buying has become a communal glue and a political strategy... Every ticket bought is scrutinised and used to calculate passenger numbers, and the viability of the service. No longer are those who travel the line individual travellers buying individual tickets to individual stations... instead, somehow, we've become a body of quiet revolutionaries
demonstrating the crucial importance of the service by buying season tickets to the furthest station on the line.

As a consequence of this, attempts at ticket avoidance are considered a sin. Indeed, the regular ticket inspectors have sensed this and have shed their normal congeniality and become like mini-despots; ogres who wander the aisles asking repeatedly for proof of travel and issuing dire threats to those who fail to produce... and then do the same again the next day... and the next.

It's like travelling under the authority of an amnesiac keeper of the bridge of death...

... and we welcome it for the good of the whole.

So imagine the horror yesterday when an unknown conductor got on the train and dilly-dallied his way up the carriage vaguely nodding as we self-righteously waved our tickets...

Imagine my further horror when I looked to my right, to find that the ticket that my neighbour was wafting noncommitally was a season ticket (phew!), dated the 7th November (gasp!)... Out of date...

... a bit like the King James Version(s) of the bible.

Of course, the thing is that the KJV wasn't always out of date... it too was revolutionary for its time... the problem is that 'its time' was 400 years ago and 'its revolution' largely irrelevant.
 
Pitch ourselves forward 400 years and what are our canonical texts, and our readings of them going to look like?

I'd suggest that they'll sound as odd as the KJV does now... and those who maintain otherwise will appear just as misguided as the KJV onlyists that I've pilloried just recently. 

Actually, it probably won't take anywhere near 400 years; the NIV is only as old as me but - unlike me (ahem) - it's already showing signs of age... and there's certainly an indication from new and emerging scholarship that even teaching from 20 years ago harks back to ways of understand the relationship between text, truth and historical interpretation that are now seriously questioned.

And it's not just the translation... looking back, the idea that even the contents of the bible should be selected according to the prevalent theology of the time, appears to be much more popular than the opposite... 

Unsettling isn't it?

Is there anything then that we can really hold to be true, realiable, worthy of our life-trust?

Only this...

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End." (Rev 22:13)

No matter what texts we pick, how we translate them, how we teach them and what we ultimately do with the truth within them... God remains unchanging.

The fact of Him, never goes out of date.