On A Theology for Modern Babylonians: The Exile as a Basis for Doing "Biblical Theology"

What does it mean to say that the Bible is "the Word of God"? Certainly it must not mean that it is a word that comes to us outside of history, or apart from the actual life experiences of ourselves, or the faith community who first produced this collection of writings that we call "Scripture." Robert Barclay, the main theologjan of the first two generations of Quakerism, wrote that there are essentially two ways to experience the leading of God: either by what he called "direct and unmediated revelation" (what we moderns call "personal experience"), or by secondary messages based on someone else's direct experiences. But in the same way that we "hear" God in the midst of our real lives and our daily experiences (and are thus influenced by them in our interpretation of what we hear), so we "hear" secondary messages through other human experiences that clearly influence how they understand and interpret what they hear. Scripture is thus among the secondary sources-and therefore we cannot ignore the lives and experiences of those from whom we have the Scriptures. In this essay, I have been asked to reflect on the possible theological meaning of one of the most significant historical events that influenced the Ancient Hebrews, and the writing of the Bible, the military defeat and mass deportation of the southern Kingdom of Judah in 587 B.C.E.