New Book: Reading The Bible with Its Writers
Just last week, Wipf & Stock published my latest book, Reading the Bible with Its Writers: What They Were Saying, Why They Said It, How They Said It. It’s available from the publishers’ website (https://wipfandstock.com/9798385228362/reading-the-bible-with-its-writers/) or Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/v59teenm — or in the US, https://tinyurl.com/ycyc43j5). Here’s some brief details.
From the back cover:
“The Bible is a collection of sixty-six books, written by many different people over many hundreds of years. All of its writers lived in an ancient-world context and thought in ancient-world ways. But as Bible readers today, we live and think in the modern world—which is increasingly a postmodern world. Things that were “obvious” to them are not “obvious” to us, and vice versa. For Christians who want to be faithful to the Bible as the Word of God, the time and distance between then and now is a real challenge to navigate. Stephen Burnhope suggests that we won’t get it right by collapsing that gap—by just picking the text up and reading it. “The Bible says . . . [insert a verse]” is not enough. We will mishear both what the human authors were saying and what the divine author was saying. Reading the Bible well starts from reading it with its writers—understanding it as they understood it: what they were saying; why they said it; and how they said it. All of which is shaped and framed by the Bible’s “big themes” that, once we’re aware of them, we see running throughout, from cover-to-cover.”
Part I of the book is devoted to those “big themes.” Theologians will have some different perspectives on what those big themes are and how they are grouped (for example, I treat “sin” under the category of “The Enemies of God” because it’s one of the hostile forces that sets its face against human thriving and relationship with God—it’s one of those John 10:10 “thieves” that look to steal, kill, and destroy, opposed to the life in abundance that Jesus wants for us). My “take” in the book is that if we understand those big themes well, then we can look to those as the lenses through which we “read” everything that Scripture is wanting to say to us. They can guide us in how to think “biblically” on questions that the biblical writers themselves never faced, including particularly twenty-first century ones. This seems to me to be a better approach than selecting proof-texts that in their contexts were responding to entirely different subjects. Where in doubt on a text’s meaning or application we can refer to the “big themes” such as the Nature and Character of God (Part I, chapter 4).
Part II addresses the many and varied genres, or types of writing, that we encounter in the Bible, and explains the “rules of the game” for reading them well. To misread the genre (this is true of any piece of writing) is to likely misread the meaning and intention of the writer (human and divine). It’s also disrespectful toward both. For example, if we assume that the most faithful way to read any text is literally, wherever that seems not to be impossible, then we are ignoring not just the genre but the writers’ intentions. If the human writer chose a particular genre to write what he wrote—affirmed by the Holy Spirit’s inspiration of that text delivered to us in that genre—then we ought to respect that.
If you’ve read How To Read The Bible Well and liked it, then I’m very confident you will like this one as well! You could think of it as a companion volume, in that it continues from where the previous book left off and further develops some of its themes.
These are just a few of the endorsements of the book:
“The question of how we interpret Scripture—and interpret it we must—is a centuries-old challenge and will continue to be so, no doubt, until Jesus returns. Steve Burnhope’s excellent new book, Reading the Bible with Its Writers, takes a deceptively simple, yet richly suggestive approach to this complex issue. Burnhope invites us to take the big themes of the Bible as our first and most important interpretive key, then consider genre and its implications as the second. Rather than reaching for our favourite ‘proof texts,’ this way of reading the biblical texts honours both their human and divine origins and challenges us again to think carefully about what it means to call them ‘the Word of God.’”
Dr. Neal Swettenham, founding senior pastor, Melton Vineyard Church, and former theology coordinator, Vineyard Churches UK & Ireland
“To be an evangelical is to engage the Bible seriously. Steve Burnhope supports this vision by helping us read the Bible with the grain, attending to its key themes and different genres. In this way he helps us attend to the process of interpretation. There are always disputes about interpretation, and I have some here as well, but Burnhope rightly focuses on hearing God’s voice so that we respond with our ‘yes’ to live in a flourishing relationship with him.”
Professor Ben C. Blackwell, principal, Westminster Theological Centre, Cheltenham
“Steve is a rare breed, in that he can take challenging, complex theological concepts, and communicate them, not only in an articulate and clear way, but in a pastoral way as well. There is such a need for pastoral wisdom in the outworking of theological truth and I am grateful that Steve has stepped into that space with Reading the Bible with Its Writers, and I highly recommend both it—and Steve—to you.”
Henry Cross, senior pastor, Rock and Redeemer Vineyard Church, Dunstable