This is a piece I wrote for the adult ed. group at the church I serve. We were studying the book of Amos, and we say that it contains both profound truth for us and some assumptions that we do not find to be true for us. Someone asked how to read the Bible for the truth that's in it. This is what I wrote in response to that question.
How to Read the Bible for the Truth That
Is in It
Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May, 2016
As we have considered the prophetic book of Amos during our
Sunday morning sessions we have discovered a perhaps surprising thing about the
Bible. The Bible contains profound truth for us, but it also contains
assumptions and understandings about God and a great many other things that no
longer ring true in today’s world. How are we to deal with that reality about
our sacred texts? That is a profoundly difficult and profoundly important
question for all believers today. I wish there were an easy answer to it. There
isn’t. One truth remains, however: Nothing excuses us from doing the hard work
of discernment when it comes to the Bible. We won’t all find the same truth in
it. The Bible speaks differently to different people in different contexts.
That being said, here are some considerations that I find to be important and
helpful in answering the question of how to read the Bible.
1.
Begin by understanding that the Bible was
written by, in, and for an ancient world that was very, very different from our
world. The Bible’s human authors operated in their own cultural-linguistic
context. That context is not our context. The ancient men (unfortunately, as
far as we know they were all men) who wrote the Bible understood God, humanity,
and nature differently than we do. That doesn’t mean they were stupid. It means
their world was different from ours. Therefore, as we read we must look for
assumptions that lie behind the text (or that may even be expressly stated in
the text) that we do not share. For example, in the case Amos one of those
assumptions is that every geopolitical event on earth is the direct result of
some intention and act by God. Amos saw the threat Assyria posed to Israel to
be a threat of God punishing the Israelites. We don’t, or at least I don’t. I
see it simply as the functioning of the geopolitical dynamics of empire. Look
for a biblical author’s assumptions, then ask if you share them or not. There
will be some we do share, and many that we don’t.
2.
Understand that reading the Bible doesn’t
require you to set aside your own context. For example, reading the Bible
doesn’t require you to ignore modern science. It doesn’t require you to ignore
modern understandings of human nature and human psychology. If the Bible is to
remain alive for us it must speak to us as we are, just as it spoke to our
ancient forbears in the faith the way they were. Here’s an example: Genesis 1
assumes that the earth exists in a bubble surrounded above, around, and below
by water. See Genesis 1:6[1]
We know that that is not the earth’s physical reality. We don’t have to pretend
that it is when we read Genesis 1. Our knowledge of the cosmos leads us to read
Genesis 1 differently that its original audience did, at least with regard to
its description of the physical universe, yet our more advanced knowledge
doesn’t make Genesis 1 false on a spiritual level despite our knowing that it
is false on the physical level.
3.
Don’t get hung up on facts. We live in a world
in which truth has largely been reduced to fact. It was not so in the world
that produced the Bible. Before the modern era, that is, before the
mid-seventeenth century, people may have understood that things in the Bible
that sound like facts are factually correct, but factual truth was not their
primary interest in the Bible. They looked more for what they called
allegorical truth. We’d call it metaphorical or mythic truth. Try to find a
truth that speaks to you behind the facts recounted in the passage you’re
reading.
4.
Don’t lose the forest for the trees. It is so
easy to get stuck on the minutiae of the Bible, so easy to spend a lot of time wrestling
with little details of a story that may be causing us trouble. Leave that work
to the scholars. Look for the bigger picture. There are several big themes that
run through much, though not all, of the Bible. Those themes include God as a
God of grace, love and forgiveness; the theme of emancipation from whatever it
is that is holding us in bondage; the theme of return home from an exile
separated from God to the eternal peace of life with God; the theme of
forgiveness of sin, which appears in both Testaments of the Christian Bible
both before and after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Passages that speak
to those great spiritual themes are likely to be true. Passages that contradict
those great spiritual themes, and there are a lot of them, are not true.
5.
Don’t read something into a passage the isn’t
there. Not every passage in the Bible is about Jesus. When Psalm 23 begins “The
Lord is my shepherd” it’s talking
about the Hebrew God Yahweh not about Jesus. Know what your preexisting
assumptions and understandings about the Bible are. Try to put them aside to
see what is really there.
6.
Use a good study Bible. The good study Bibles I
know that use only one translation use the New Revised Standard Version translation
not the New International Version, but their study notes should be helpful
whatever translation you primarily use. I have not found what I consider to be
a good study Bible with the NIV except The
New Interpreters Bible, a twelve volume scholarly work that uses both the
NRSV and the NIV and that is both cumbersome to use and very expensive. (A
retiring pastor friend of mine gave me his, which is the only reason I have
it.) A study Bible won’t answer all of your questions, but it will answer some
of them.
7.
Trust your experience of God, and don’t let
anything turn you from the God you know and love. You will find passages in the
Bible that do not speak of that God. Don’t worry about it. Those passages just
mean that some ancient author had a different understanding than you do. Be
open to having your beliefs challenged. Be open to leaning more about God every
time you turn to the Bible, but don’t take any passage in the Bible as
universally true just because it’s in the Bible.
8.
Finally, but perhaps most importantly, look to
Jesus. The Bible contains a great many different voices. Those voices often
contradict each other on a great many issues. How are we to decide among them?
One way for us Christians to decide among them is to use Jesus as our guide.
Does something, anything, in the Bible reflect the God of love, compassion,
forgiveness, and grace that we see in and through Jesus? Does something,
anything, in the Bible reflect the care for and welcome of the poor,
ostracized, scorned, and marginalized that was a hallmark of Jesus’ ministry
and teaching? If so, it speaks truth to us Christians. If not, it simply isn’t
true for us. It isn’t true for us because it contradicts the ultimate
revelation of God that we see in Jesus. Don’t look to the Old Testament to
predict Jesus. Look to Jesus to interpret both the Old and New Testaments.
[1] The
NIV here uses the word “expanse.” The NRSV uses the word “dome” in its place. I
suspect that the NRSV is truer to the Hebrew original here.
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