How do you read the Bible?
How do you read the Bible? I ask because we rightly often talk of the need for regular, ideally daily, study of the scriptures, but we spend less time explaining how best to understand them.
There has for example been a tradition of ‘Bible inerrancy’, that is to say that the Bible is without error or fault in all its teaching. The problem with that belief is that it is humans who have written and edited the Bible- not God. He is infallible. We are not.
Part of the problem I suspect is that some Christians tend to take a very fundamental approach to Bible literacy to such a degree that they can interpret what is said as meaning exactly what it says. In a lot of cases that is true- for example when in Matthew 22:37-39, Jesus says:
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all they mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”
That is a direct commandment we must follow-no ifs, no buts- it needs little analysis or thought about what Jesus means by that.
But elsewhere in both the Old and New Testaments, prophets and indeed Jesus himself, use metaphors to make a point and they were never intended to be taken literally but as a vivid illustration of what we should do-they told stories to make a point because that is how we understand things. I suppose the most obvious one is Jesus’ teaching earlier on in Matthew 5:29 when he said:
“If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into sin”.
To believe that Jesus want us to self-amputate our eye if it is a problem is a horrifically false reading of the Gospel, although rather scaringly, it is claimed that one Christian scholar, Origen of Alexandria, self-castrated himself because of his literal reading of another part of Matthew -gulp!. What Jesus means though is if there is something about you that makes you sin then you should get rid of it or at least avoid it. For example, if you have a group of friends who are not good or healthy for you, or who take you away from God and his teachings, then change your relationships with them-they may not be good for you.
I recall the great writer CS Lewis rejecting the literal reading of the Bible because of a number of passages which disproved the argument that every statement in Scripture must be historically true. They are not falsehoods but when reading something in the Bible I think we need to ask ourselves one overriding question- what is this author trying to tell me? Are they reporting a literal event or piece of teaching that I need to accept and act on, or is it maybe a metaphor that requires us to understand in order that we should live our faith and our lives to the glory of God?
Tags: The Bible, Inerrancy, NewTestament, OldTestament