Reading the Bible

There was an interesting article at Discipleship Research about reading the Bible. It's titled "Wrestling with the Biblical Text: When we don’t like what it says". The question at hand: How do you read the Bible? Do you take it face value? Do you not? Do you take it at face value when it agrees with your preconception and not when it doesn't?

The writer, Ruth Perrin, talks about our problem as Bible-believing Christians. We claim to "adopt a plain sense reading of Scripture (it means what it says) and assume it to be accurate", but when we run into something that causes a difficulty, we don't. We have to employ some strategy to explain why it does not mean what it says. Often we will overlay a theological value to explain why it doesn't mean what it says and "simply get the Bible to say back to us what we already believe." (Interestingly, our canon of Scripture came about largely because of a guy named Marcion who put together his own "canon". He scrapped the Old Testament and much of the New because he didn't like the "angry God" he saw there. Sound familiar?) Ruth says, "We might think we read the Bible in a straightforward way – but we really don't."

So, what to do? Millenials, according to Ruth, had a variety of approaches. They might accept the difficult text without question or find some historical or cultural way it made sense then ("We must be missing some information."). They might give up and say, "We don't know why, but we'll assume it says what it means." They might disagree with the text -- "That's not the God I know" -- and figure the wording was wrong or the translation was wrong or maybe the writers were wrong -- too backward or something. You know, like when God struck Uzzah dead (2 Sam 6:1-7) it wasn't really God who did it; it was Uzzah's fears that probably caused a heart attack or something. Or they might just reject it out of hand. That might range from "I don't believe that" to "Well, God permitted it but He didn't cause it even though it says He did."

The question, then, is what do you do? What should we do? Scripture is certainly littered with stuff that is ... sticky. There's all that "smiting" and stuff. There are tough passages that seem to say God does things that we're not really comfortable with Him doing. There are, if we are honest, worldview-shaking things in our Bibles. What do we do? Do we interpret the Bible by what it says? Or do we interpret it by what makes us comfortable or agrees with our preconceptions? Do we allow it to reshape our ideas and, therefore, our lives? Or do we force it to conform?

If the Bible is breathed out by God (2 Tim 3:16), if it was written by men who were "carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21), then we can be fairly sure of some things. First, it is reliable. Second, it is important enough to shape our lives and thinking. Third, coming from God who is above all, it will not always agree with our own finite, sin-tainted thinking. So what will you do? Will you let Scripture speak for itself as God's Word and do so consistently? Or will you rearrange it to suit you?