ENGLISH LORD'S PRAYER Our father, who art in heaven Hallowed be thy name Thy kingdom come Thy will be done On earth as it is in heaven Give us this day our daily bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil For thine is the kingdom forever Amen | EBONICS Big Daddy's Rap Yo, Big Daddy upstairs, You be chillin So be yo hood You be sayin' it, I be doin' it In this ere hood and yo's Gimme some eats And cut me some slack, Blood So's I be doin' it to dem dat diss me Don' be pushin' me into no jive And keep dem crips away 'Cause you always be da man, Straight up |
...there is something always elusive about the Bible. This fixed text has a life of its own, which the reader cannot by some simple process of reading capture as his or her own. The dynamic quality of scripture has to do with the fact that while the text itself does not change, we who read that text do change; it is not that we adapt ourselves to the world of the Bible and play at re-creating it as in a pageant or tableau "long ago and far away." Rather, it is that the text actually adapts itself to our capacity to hear it. Thus we hear not as first-century Christians, nor even as eighteenth-century Christians, but as men and women alive here and now. We hear the same texts that our ancestors heard but we hear them not necessarily as they heard them, but as only we can. Thus the reading and the hearing of scripture are for Christians in each generation a Pentecostal experience.
©C. David Hess 1997