How Do I Read the Bible

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 2 Timothy 3:14-17:

I want you to think about the first Bible you ever received, or that you can remember having. Who gave it to you? How old where you when receive it? What did it look like? Was it a children’s Bible or a regular Bible? Did it have a special place in your house or room where it was kept? Was it treated like any other book or was it treated special? Did your family have other copies of the Bible? How where they treated and where were they kept? Do you still own that Bible? If not, do you know what happened to it? I want you to think about that Bible, and then turn to someone near you and tell each other about that Bible…. I knew that my first Bible was special in some way, although I don’t remember anyone telling me it was special, it was just sort of conveyed. It was different than other books. I knew the stories where special, although I couldn’t tell you why. I mean if nothing else it’s pretty rare to have a book read in public any more and yet this book is read from every week in worship, and we don’t hear from other books in that way. But no one ever said that we read it differently or treat it differently than other books, but we did, and no one ever said this is how to read the Bible. And I’m willing to guess that’s true for most of you as well. And I’m not talking about Sunday school classes that dealt with stories, because they might have actually made approaching scripture even more troubling or confusing. And so today in our series we are going to be looking at how to read scripture, and please note that I can’t get to everything and so some of this will be a 30,000 foot view of reading scripture.

But let’s start with some basics. The Bible is widely considered the best selling book of all time, and large numbers of people own a copy, besides for being found in hotel rooms, and also report believing what it says to be true. But it might be like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. A book that everyone has, but few people actually read, and surveys show us this general sense of misinformation. So, for example, 10% of people say that Joan of Ark was Noah’s wife. Only 1/3 can identify that Jesus delivered the sermon on the mount, and more than that think that Billy Graham gave it. 40% believe that both the old and the new testament were written a few years after Jesus’ death, and a not insignificant percentage believe that it was all written in English. Or as a Texas woman was reported to have said, although it’s probably just apocryphal, “If English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.” It was not written in English, not a word, but instead it’s in Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible, or the Old testament, and Greek for the New Testament.

That means that we have to read it in translation, unless you want to learn ancient Greek and Hebrew. And so, translations are important, and it also says something about those who believe in what has been called inerrancy, which we’re not going to go into today, other than for me to say that this is a new idea, developing in the last 150 years, and it arose on the Protestant side at exactly the same time, and for the same reasons that Papal inerrancy also arose as an idea. But the fact that there are differences in translation is the first indicator that there could be problems. The second is that the official formulation of inerrancy says that the original manuscripts were inerrant, but the problem is that we don’t have any of the original manuscripts. Our manuscripts come from the 3rd and 4th centuries. And finally, although the passage we heard from 2 Timothy today is often used to justify inerrancy, it does nothing of the sort. It does not say that God dictated scripture. Instead it says that it is inspired by God. that is something very different. And the Scripture being referred to is the Hebrew Bible, and so this passage shows us how easy it is to abuse a passage to make it mean something it didn’t mean.

But the bigger piece for us that makes reading the Bible different than it has for most of the history of the church, and even under Judaism, you didn’t ever have access to all of the books of the Bible in one place. Until the invention of the printing press you wouldn’t have been able to hold the Bible in one hand, and you wouldn’t have had them all in one book. And even then, if you’ve ever seen a Guttenberg Bible, they were massive, so you still couldn’t hold it in one hand. And so, as we think of the Bible, this is a new thing and having it all together has definitely impacted what we have thought about the Bible, and not necessarily for the better. But, this is a collection of books. It’s not one. And why that’s important, and what it has to do with how we read, is that we have to let each book tell its story, and sometimes those stories are in dialogue with each other, and contradicting each other. 

Probably the best example of this is the book of Ruth, which tells us about Ruth, a Moabite woman, who, long story short, marries an Israelite man, and in doing so becomes the great-grandmother of King David. Now this mixed marriage stands in contrast to the story of Ezra and Nehemiah in which Israelite men are told to abandon their foreign wives and families and instead marry a good Jewish girl. The book of Ruth is therefore in conversation with, and against, these two books, as well as other portions, like in Deuteronomy where anyone of Moabite descent, even to the 10th generation, shall not be admitted into the assembly, or tent, of the Lord. So, Israel’s greatest king is of a mixed-marriage, of Moabite descent, and of course the person who builds the Temple, Solomon, is also and only fourth generation, so a violation of Deuteronomic law. So, pay attention to these conversations and be cautious when saying “the Bible says” because it might also say exactly the opposite. It’s also why being familiar with the whole Bible, and reading the whole thing is important.

And that then leads into the fact that the different books have different styles, or genres of literature. There are histories and laws and poetry and prophets and apocalypses and letters and gospels, to name just a few different styles. And each of those things has to be approached and read differently. So, the county recently redid the building codes and so if I was to give you that document and then also give you a book of poetry would you read them the same way? Of course not. And the same is true with the Bible. You can’t read Leviticus, which is a series of rules, the same way you read Psalms, a series of poems, which are also songs, and so perhaps gives an even different way. One has a much more factual basis, and one is heavy on imagery which also lends itself to non-literal understanding. When Psalm 18 says, the Lord is my rock and my fortress, does that mean a literal rock, or a literal structure? No, and so we have to understand that as we begin reading. 

And to build off that, which plays into what we already talked about with inerrancy, if you walked into the library at Alexandria, which was one of the greatest libraries in the ancient world and you asked them to show you their non-fiction section, they would have no idea what you meant. The idea that something is either true or untrue, with nothing in between is a modern concept, and it can’t be applied to documents that weren’t intended to have that, without forcing them to be and to do something that they simply cannot do by themselves. And so, when we read scripture we have to understand their purpose is theological, not historical. They are seeking to tell the story of God and of God’s people, not to record history, or science, the way we would understand that in a modern context. And if we force scripture to be modern in the way we do, it will always come up short, but that’s not the Bible’s problem, that’s our problem.

And so that can lead us to ask if there are some things then that are more important than others. Is there a hierarchy to scripture? And so here is where I do my little dance and say yes, with some significant caveats. It’s clear from Jesus and the apostles that some areas of scripture were more used, than others. So, for example, Isaiah and Psalms are quoted quite a bit, whereas others, like Ezra and Lamentations, are not quoted at all. Clearly Jesus saying that we are to turn the other cheek trumps the passage from Exodus which says an eye for an eye, or that what goes out is more important than what goes in, because Jesus specifically says that it is being replaced. But what about other passages, or how do we rank what’s more important, or even what might be ignored, such as the fact that we don’t follow kosher laws nor do we require circumcision? Well that’s where the hard work really begins, and where the trouble can also start, because the truth is that we all pick and choose scripture that we want to follow and what we want to ignore. Liberal, conservative, middle of the road, we all pick and choose, even the authors of the New Testament did it. In 1 Timothy we read that men should have authority over women because Adam was made first. Well that’s picking and choosing to make the point he wants to make, and it totally ignores the first creation story in which men and women were made at the same time. We all pick and choose, so what do we do about it, and how do we do it with integrity?

First is to recognize that we are doing it, and second, and most importantly, is to have a reason for why we pick and choose what we do. It’s not just rejecting things because we don’t like them, or because we think they don’t apply to us, because more than likely in doing that we are rejecting things exactly because they apply to us. Scripture should not only give us wisdom and insight, it is after all not just a means of grace, of feeling God’s love, but also, as John Wesley says, “contains all things necessary for our salvation.” That means it should push us and challenge us as well. It’s been said that preaching should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, well scripture should be doing exactly the same thing. We should be both comforted and afflicted by what we read, and when we are challenged the answer isn’t to throw it out, but to figure out what it’s challenging, and what are we going to do about it, and when we decide that something might not apply any more is to be able to give reasons, and more than “I disagree”, but sound theological reasons with scriptural background to support your argument. And a lot of that comes from context. A number of years ago, State Farm did a great commercial that has something to say about this, so take a look…  

Just as a disclaimer, I am not advocating for State Farm, and neither I nor any family member have anything to do with State Farm. I just though it was good because both the young woman and the man say exactly the same things, right? But how they say it and why they say it are completely different. Context matters. And so, while we can quote chapter and verse, which also allows us to chop them out of the text, losing the context of where they passage is found or even of the book in which they are found. But to understand a passage we have to understand its context there, as well as the context in the ancient world, which is even harder work, because sometimes words are being used in English that have an entirely different understanding originally.

And that means our context matters too. While you may hear people talk about not wanting to interpret scripture, but instead to let the scripture simply say what it says, that’s impossible to do. All of us bring our own context to what we read. It’s impossible not to. We bring who we are, what we’ve done, what we’ve experienced into our reading of scripture. It’s the lens we use, and the more we understand about the lens, about our context, the better we will be in recognizing what we bring so that we can try and see scripture differently than we might otherwise do. And so that leads into why we might want to read scripture. What are we hoping to get out of it? Scripture as a daily devotion is very different than scripture for study for a message which is different than seeking God’s guidance for a particular point in our lives which is different for some other reason. What we want to get will also impact what translation we might use. If we are looking for inspiration, then Eugene Peterson’s The Message can be a great resource, or if we’re looking for a new way of seeing something, which is often how I use it. But, if we want to study, or to be able to say, Mark says, or Deuteronomy says, then that’s not where you want to go. The NRSV, which we use, is a better source, with the NIV being comparable. So, then you are approaching scripture with a specific task, and its okay, in fact its great, to be led by the Spirit differently than perhaps what you set out to do. And so, scripture reading, like just about everything else, should begin with prayer. As I said last week for beginning worship with prayer that you get what you pray for, the same is true with reading the Bible.

It’s also okay to struggle with parts and to know that you are not alone in those things because contexts and realities have changed. Reading the prophets can be difficult in trying to understand, and so use outside resources, although be aware that not every resource is good or useful, and some might be downright unhelpful. But, sitting on the sideline saying “I’d like to play, but I don’t know how” is not acceptable. Get off the bench and begin engaging with scripture. It will change your life, and as your life changes your reading will change too. If you are a senior citizen and you still read it as you did when you were a teenager, there’s something wrong. And we have to be open to the Spirit to see new things, to be uplifted and to be challenged, and if scripture isn’t challenging you occasionally there’s something wrong too. And as Methodists we are also encourage to bring tradition, experience and reason to the reading of scripture, known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, and I gave a message about that last year that I would encourage you to watch on our YouTube channel, or speak with me about.

We must also approach scripture with humility, because as soon as we think we have scripture figured out we need to go back and read it again because we’ve probably missed something. And we approach the scripture with arrogance, then it becomes a weapon, that honestly usually leads us away from its very teachings. Scripture is inspired and it is inspiring. These are the books that the church has said are important. St. Augustine said that the goal of scripture was to induce love for God and neighbor and thus to order our lives accordingly. As we are called to know and love God, that means that we need to be reading scripture, and if we are not being challenged by scripture, then we are not reading it closely enough, if we are not being inspired by scripture, then we are not reading it closely enough. but know that when we read scripture the best we can, that’s the best we can do. So, go and pick up your bible and pray and read, and question and be challenged, for scripture “is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.