Most Christian groups claim the Bible as
our ultimate authority for understanding God and his will for our lives. But we don’t always act that way. I’m not speaking about the fact that studying
the Bible is more like a good idea than actual practice for many of us. That’s true, unfortunately, and for decades
pundits have bemoaned the decline of Biblical literacy in our churches. There is another, subtler issue at work in
the way we study the Bible, when we actually take the time to crack it open and
read it.
Philosopher
Hans-Georg Gadamer compared the way we read the Bible, or any other book, to
how we play a game. You have to play a
game by its rules, or you just won’t get the point of the game. For example, you can’t tackle someone during a
basketball game, and roll a six in Monopoly and move five spaces. In the same way, when you read the Bible you
need to enter its world, so to speak, to get at its meaning.
That’s
harder to do than it sounds. We often
come to the Bible with our own ideas, values, and priorities, to find out how
it answers our questions. But if the
Bible truly is an authority for us, we ought to go one step further and allow
the Bible to teach us what really matters.
The questions and issues that we think are so important may not really
matter for the way that the Bible describes life and faith.
For
example, many people wonder if we will recognize our loved ones in heaven. We miss them terribly and hope to be reunited
with them. The Bible, however, is
frustratingly vague about this issue.
Apparently that’s not a big deal in heaven, no matter how important it
seems to us here on earth.
Many
churches consider homosexuality to be a foundational issue upon which
Christians must take a stand.
Congregations have left denominations over this issue, and many churches
include it on the “What We Believe” page of their website. However, this topic is barely footnote in
Scripture, only mentioned a handful of times.
If the Bible truly is our guide, why would we get bent out of shape over
something that it treats so trivially?
And why do we blithely ignore other concerns that the Bible discusses
often and in great detail, such as economic justice for the poor and observing
the Sabbath?
Such
fascination with arcane trivia in the Bible jumps into overdrive when it comes
to questions about Christ’s return.
“End-times” topics such as the mark of the beast, the rapture, and
millennialism arise from brief, and my opinion often misunderstood, allusions
in Scripture. They are certainly not the
central themes in the Bible’s description of our future hope.
I’ve
even heard people say that the key to understanding all of Scripture can be
found in an obscure verse in Genesis that describes how the “sons of God” had
children with the “daughters of humans” and gave birth to the Nephilim. God did not give us Scripture as a puzzle or
mystery to solve. His desire is for us
to submit ourselves to the Bible’s own priorities and values, and reflect on
how we can live them out in our lives and in our world.
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