In various seminary classes, we've talked about Biblical truth/inerrancy and how we came to have these books in the Bible and not others. I found myself wishing, not for the first time, that we had a way to add books. The Christian New Testament is much too heavy with the works of Paul and the fact that they are all letters to specific communities wrestling with particular problems makes them only somewhat useful to me.
How might our faith have developed in more vibrant ways if we had included more through the years, not limited ourselves to the ones that the earliest communities chose to preserve? By now we'd have a huge book, if we had kept everything.
Of course, I have bookshelves which serve a similar function. I look through some of them and think about how, when I've needed inspiration or consolation or wisdom, much more often I've turned to Kathleen Norris or Madeleine L'Engle than the letters of Paul.
And like any good evangelist, I've sung the praises of women theologians too often overlooked. Recently, in the minutes before class started, I heard a classmate tell another one about Dakota, by Kathleen Norris. I chimed in to talk about the other work she's written. After class, I apologized for crashing into their conversation, and they were gracious--and then we went on to talk about Norris some more. What a treat.
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