I've written another essay on Biblical interpretation. This deals with various ways we use the Bible, and what approach really leads to the best understanding of the message of the Bible.
life road simple tripIncreasingly, my great passion is for the Bible to have its way in the Christian church. As I grow older, I have less confidence in Christians, but I have an increasing confidence in the Bible as an inspired text, and as a genuine message from the Creator to His creatures. While I do not subscribe to the language of inerrancy, I believe the Bible is true in the greatest sense of truth: that its various ways of speaking, through different authors and various genres, all amount to the presentation of a true Word in an increasingly relativizing world.
My passion is especially piqued when I hear the Bible used by contemporary preachers. In their confidence that the Bible is God's inspired Word, many have yielded to ways of using the Bible that are deficient, even destructive of the Bible's true message, power and glory. I want to suggest how we might approach the Bible in a sensible and rational manner that allows the book to speak its truth most clearly and deeply into our lives.
Magic Books
I want to begin with a question: "What is the best way to encounter the message God has for us in the Bible?"
My answer will be "In understanding the overall message of the books that mostly clearly describe the person and significance of Jesus Christ."
That's not the normal answer, but it is an important answer. The normal answer is something like this: "The best way to encounter the truth about God in the Bible is through experiencing and believing the content of individual verses." Now why do I say this is the "normal" answer? Because the vast majority of Bible based Christianity recommends approaching the Bible as an inspired book, but they also teach that our personal encounter with God happens in discovering verses that "speak" to us personally. These may be promises or invitations or statements about truth. Of course, these verses occur in passages, chapters and books, but it is the verses that have the preeminence among evangelical Christians.
(I realize that some of the following critique applies to the misuse of passages and not just verses, particularly miracle stories and narratives, but most of the mischief will eventually prove to be taking a verse and abusing it. I'll trust my readers to get the point, and apply it where needed.)
My spiritual mentor, John Piper, preaches verse by verse, often dwelling on the phraseology and grammar of a particular verse. He recommends diagramming verses. In his devotional work, he frequently talks about starting the day reading the Bible until you find a verse that speaks to you for that day. He stresses scripture memory, and uses the "Fighter Verse" program to teach scripture memory to his congregation.
I do not have any quarrel with the value of this approach, but I disagree with anyone who would say it is the best, most profitable and most basic way to encounter the message God has for us in the Bible. In fact, I fear that many who approach the Bible as a collection of verses miss, completely or substantially, the primary message of the Bible, and frequently abuse the "verse" approach to the detriment of the total Christian message.
To get to this issue, let me walk back through some of my favorite illustrations about how Christians view and use the Bible.
I believe most Christians use the word "inspiration" to mean "the Bible is a magic book, where God speaks to us in unusual ways." By this they mean that the contents of the Bible--the verses--have unusual power when read or applied. So if we were to transfer this idea to another book, and treat it as we treat the Bible, it might be like this: If we considered "Walden" to be inspired in the typical evangelical way, we would not be looking for the big ideas or the main point in Thoreau's book, but we would be examining particular sentences to see if they "spoke to us." The actual text of "Walden" would be secondary to our use of verses.
So on, let's say, the matter of changing jobs, we might find a sentence that says, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation," and we would conclude that this verse is God telling us to change jobs. Or another sentence might say, "I left my job and moved to the woods." This, we would say, is God speaking to us. Now we might be able to read the entire book and sustain that conclusion, or we might find--if we studied better--that the book didn't sustain that particular use of an individual sentence. It wouldn't really matter, however, to most of us, because God used the verse to speak to us, and that is the way we read the Bible.