\n<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know about you but I grew up with this nagging thought in the back of my mind when I read my Bible: am I doing it right?<\/p>\n
As a recovering perfectionist, I am learning that \u201cdoing it right\u201d isn\u2019t actually the point of reading the Bible. The challenge of course is that many of us read the Bible with different purposes in mind, so \u201cright\u201d is relative. If I am teaching at a university and am trained in biblical scholarship, my purpose for reading the Bible is often about trying to understand the history of the Bible, who wrote it, and under what circumstances. If my interests are about seeing how the Bible is literature, my idea of reading it \u201cright\u201d will look differently.<\/p>\n
To state the obvious, most of us aren\u2019t Bible professors or literary critics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re like me, we grew up with this purpose: the Bible has information in it that will help me live like God wants me to and it\u2019s my job to get that information and put it into practice.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So, we want to know how the Bible applies to our life right now. But considering the Bible wasn\u2019t written to us, to our culture, or to the modern-day, this poses a problem. How do we appropriate someone else\u2019s story (the OT) and someone else\u2019s mail (the NT)? Lately, I\u2019ve been wondering if \u201crespect\u201d isn\u2019t a helpful way of thinking about it.<\/p>\n
That is, when we are trying to appropriate something that was primarily<\/em><\/strong> intended for someone else, getting it \u201cright\u201d might depend on how well we respect the process. More specifically, I\u2019ve been thinking about three questions that help me better judge whether my reading of the Bible, when I\u2019m reading it to discern what it means to be faithful to God today, is toward the \u201cright\u201d end of the spectrum or toward the \u201cwrong\u201d end of the spectrum.<\/p>\n Does it respect the original voice?<\/strong><\/p>\n Unfortunately, when we read for what it means for us today, we don\u2019t get to ignore the original voices. It is still important to take our time and energy to understand the historical, cultural, and literary contexts of the Bible. In this case, respect is given when we pay attention to the original author and their original hearers before<\/em> trying to ask what it means for us today. Now, that\u2019s not to say we have to agree with it all to respect it. See, for example, Phyllis Trible\u2019s masterful book Texts of Terror<\/em>. In other words, to read the Bible we can\u2019t just \u201cmake it mean whatever we want it to mean.\u201d<\/p>\n Does it respect my community\u2019s voice? <\/strong><\/p>\n This is where my tradition got it wrong, I might suggest humbly. I was taught that to respect the Bible was to lose your own voice, experience, feelings, and contemporary situation. As a community of faith in the 21st<\/sup> century, we are asking different questions, have different knowledge, and find ourselves in different challenges than the original hearers. How well does my reading allow for advances in science, psychology, ethics<\/a>, and sociology? If it doesn\u2019t then it might not be a good reading.<\/p>\n Does it respect my neighbor? <\/strong><\/p>\n This is, of course, the best standard for reading the Bible. The challenge, of course, is coming to an agreement on what is loving to our neighbor. But if we don\u2019t start with that as our goal, and keep it as the rubric we use to judge our reading of the Bible, we are transgressing the basic teachings of Jesus. For in Matthew 22, when asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus replied that it was to love God and that the second was like it, to love our neighbors as ourselves. Does our reading of the Bible consistently produce loving actions? If not, we may want to reconsider how we interpret.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n