7 Ways To Be Reading The Bible Well
In last week’s blog, What Exactly Is The Bible, and How Does It “Work”?, we looked at some of the challenges that come from the nature of the Bible as the “inspired” “Word of God.” “Inspired” is a way of translating the more-literal “God-breathed” of 2 Timothy 3:16 (the only biblical reference to the nature of the Bible). The “Word of God” comes not from the Bible itself but from Christians’ understandable desire to honour the divine inspiration of the text (and in that sense, rightly so), but it’s also the origin of most of our problems figuring out what, exactly, the Bible “is” and how the contribution of its human writers interacts with that of its divine co-author. The danger is that this phrase—the “Word of God”—takes on a life of its own, taken to imply multiple attributes beyond anything that’s obviously being said by 2 Timothy 3:16 .
I ended last week saying we would look at some simple, easy ways to be reading the Bible well, and avoiding reading it badly. Here, then, are seven thoughts.
1. “The Meaning” of a Verse or Passage
One would think this ought to be self-evidently everyone’s first question whenever we open the Bible and read something; and even more so, if we want to purport to “teach” from it. It’s very simple but it’s often ignored. The “meaning” of a verse or passage is always and only what it would have meant—what it would have been saying, what it would have been talking about, and why—for its original author and audience. The meaning is never and can never be something that would never have occurred to the original author and audience. Anything that someone today says a verse or passage means that the original author and audience would look on with incredulity is never something’s meaning.
Once we have established that, as best we can, following standard interpretive methodologies, then we can turn our attention to the quite distinct question of how that meaning, then, relates to us, now, today. It may be something that’s exactly the same; something that follows the same value or principle, albeit perhaps worked out in a different way; or . . . nothing at all. By that last point, I mean that the verse or passage reflects a timebound truth for that time and place, rather than a timeless truth for all times and places. How do we know the difference? The spiritual gift of wisdom.
We do see an exception to this general interpretive principle in the New Testament writers’ treatment of some Old Testament passages. However, that doesn’t give us the right to do it! Their interpretations and applications are themselves Scripture; ours are not.
2. “Context, Context, Context”
. . . is to biblical interpretation what “location, location, location” is to property. Taking full and proper account of context is intrinsic to a verse or passage’s meaning, of course, but it’s important enough to warrant a separate point as well.
Before something we read in the Bible is ever saying something to us, today, it was saying something to an original audience 2,000 or more years ago. The biblical writers had things in mind: reasons for saying what they said, in conversations to which we are merely eavesdroppers and voyeurs. Bluntly, what we are reading wasn’t written to us, to teach us something (at least, not in the first instance).
If we don’t know what that original intention was, then we have no foundation to begin to ask what it might be saying to us today.
Original context does not just mean a word in a verse in a sentence in a chapter (until mediaeval times there were no chapters or verses, and there were certainly no headings to “tell us what this next bit means”—beware those impositions on the text, some are notorious). Context includes the genre (meaning, the types of writing—all of which have their own “rules” for reading them well); what was going on in the world of the writer and his audience at the time; where in the big picture biblical journey something is situated (especially whether it is pre- or post-Jesus); and the “worldview” of the writers and their audiences (everything that would have been “obvious” to them about life, the universe, and “the ways things are” at the time).
3. “Proof-texts”
If only I had a pound—OK, I’ll settle for a dollar, even though they’re not worth as much—for every sermon I’ve heard which was basically stringing together a series of selected Bible verses deployed one-by-one to “prove” something is “what the Bible teaches.” A talk that is basically a series of decontextualized verses strung together is not in and of itself “biblical”—still less, “biblical teaching.” To deploy an isolated verse in that way we must be absolutely certain that the meaning we are claiming for it is consistent with (a) its meaning in its original context, and (b) Scripture as a whole. The same is true for any application that we claim for it. If that meaning or application is something the original writer and audience would never have conceived in a million years, then we may be on dodgy ground.
4. “Meaning” versus “Meaningful”
Now there is almost always some kind of exception to an absolute statement, and what I’ve just said is no exception. Actually it’s not so much an exception as a distinction. There is no reason at all that the Holy Spirit cannot speak meaningfully to us through a verse or passage in a way that does not fully conform to its original meaning (as defined above). It’s entirely legitimate for a reader or speaker to find something meaningful like that in and through a passage. This is basically what the Reformers found vis-à-vis law and grace in Galatians—which, thanks to recent research known as the New Perspective on Paul, we now know (but they didn’t) was not its meaning in its original context.
However—and it’s a big however—that doesn’t mean that “anything goes” meaningfulness-wise. Whatever the reader or speaker believes that the Holy Spirit is speaking to them meaningfully about in and through a verse or passage does not need to meet an “original meaning” test but it does have to meet another test. It must comport with Scripture as a whole, and be consistent with the nature and character of God that we see revealed in Jesus. This is our simple safeguard against “stark raving bonkers” ideas.
A tricky category in relation to meaning and meaningful is when a speaker applies a verse or passage in an analogous or metaphorical way—as a “picture” of something. Old Testament stories are particularly prone to being (mis)used like that; in a way, they lend themselves to that because they’re stories. The problem comes when what we’re saying it pictures has absolutely nothing to do with its original meaning in its original context. It may offer an apparently interesting “picture” to something we can relate to in the Christian life today, by analogy, but it does not thereby qualify as “biblical teaching” and still less, as “What this passage is saying.” It isn’t, so we shouldn’t use that language about it. We might just as well use stories from the Lord of the Rings.
5. Beware Exegeting the English Words
Most of us, most of the time, are reading a verse or passage in our native language—often in English. The Bible, however, was written in Hebrew and Greek, with a bit of Aramaic here and there. When we read and “teach” from the Bible we’re doing that from an English translation of the Bible, of which there are now dozens to choose from, many of which render many verses very differently.
What I often see happening in theologically untrained speakers is that they will read a verse (in English) and then go straight to a dictionary from which to explain the meaning of those English words. What they are unwittingly doing is exegeting the English, rather than the original. For example, the Hebrew word shalom is often translated “peace” in English Bibles (they have to translate it as something) but that English word is wholly inadequate to express the deep and rich meaning in the Hebrew word. To preach about “peace” as we often think of it today—in an emotional health and absence of stress kind of way, centered on me and my personal spiritual well-being—will therefore have precious little to do with shalom understood properly. The so-called “teaching” will be missing the point, because it will be exegeting an English (rather than the original) word and going off on a tangent as a result.
Our goal is to reflect (to be faithful to) what the original writers had in mind in the words that they used in their native language. Bible translation is, in itself, an act of interpretation, which we need to be aware of—remember that translators and their publishing houses have ideological positions, too. Obvious examples of this can be seen where a version chooses the English word “homosexual” (a word that did not exist in any ancient language and was only created in the late nineteenth century), or the word “hell” to translate Hades or Sheol (which simply mean, “the place of the dead,” and neither of which correspond to the modern evangelical notion of hell).
6. Recognize your Presuppositions
A presupposition is an idea, or belief, or other kind of prior knowledge, that we bring with us to the text when we open the Bible. It is our presuppositions that lead to so-called “confirmation bias,” meaning, what we find in the Bible confirms what we already know or think we know. We find something because we are conditioned to finding it; we expect to find it. We then have “the Bible says” to reinforce that.
The thing about presuppositions is that they are unavoidable. We all have them. That is not the problem. The problem is when we don’t realize that we have them and don’t know what they are (or see how they are influencing us vis-à-vis the Bible and what it is and isn’t “saying”). This means we can’t allow for them.
Thanks to presuppositions, conservative Christians will find biblical support for their conservative views, while liberal Christians will find biblical support for their liberal views (neither of those terms is ideal, but you get the point).
Our presuppositions come from a variety of sources. Our social world is an obvious one, but also, our prior Christian experience: talks we’ve heard; things we’ve been told; things that we and our church tradition takes for granted as “must be,” and “can’t be.” Things we think are “obvious.” Presuppositions also come from our upbringing, our education, and whether we’ve grown up in a mostly Modern or Postmodern world.
Another source is what’s called “folk theology,” meaning, ideas that get passed around in Christian circles—charismatics and Pentecostals are particularly good at this—but which have no real biblical theological basis. The Holy Spirit is a particular victim of folk theology, since he is perceived to be the mysterious one of the Trinity, who might do anything at any time. A folk theology therefore builds up around the things he does: how he does them, what signs to look out for, what techniques to use to invoke him moving, and so on (largely because Scripture is silent on practical outworkings, so folk theology steps into the gap). Is it all bad (or harmful)? No. But we should be aware when that’s what it is.
7. Leave Room For the Bible’s Humanity
No serious scholar thinks that the Bible was in any meaningful sense divinely “dictated.” It could have been, but it wasn’t. That’s not a weakness, it’s by divine design. The humanity in the text is supposed to be there, so we should not shortchange it. Here’s the thing, though: God did not assume the role of Editor-in-chief to veto anything that he couldn’t put hand on heart and endorse. So when we see certain things happening, especially in the Old Testament, pre-Jesus, we’re allowed to say, “These people are getting God wrong in some of the things they’re saying and doing.” Don’t suppress or take a blue pencil to the humanity in the Bible. You’re allowed to call things out and argue with the text—preferably in community. It’s not all designed to be “God’s instruction manual.” I blame the ambiguity in that term, "The Word of God,” for the assumption that it is.