Here we are again`

Photo by Daniel Morton on Unsplash
Well it's been a few weeks, and there's been a lot of reading going on though, for various reasons, I've not fulfilled my aim of reading Dan McLellan's 'The Bible Says So' though I keep up with Dan's work online and continue to be grateful for his insights and refutations of bad Biblical Scholarship and misinformation. 


I remember a time when I thought I had all the answers, when I thought that I knew about what was in the Bible, that I read the Bible in the way it was meant to be read. I know now that I was being fed a certain way of reading Scripture that backed up my presuppositions rather than allowing Scripture to challenge me, or allowing me to challenge the Scriptures I read. 

When writers such as Zach Lambert, whose book I reviewed in my last post, or Dan McLellan offer new ways of learning about the Bible and its construction, and new ways of interpreting and viewing the Bible, I now realize that this is not the threat I thought it was forty years ago where it was made clear just how I should read the Bible. Scripture is not fragile, nor is it perfect (nor does it make that claim for itself, that's a much later dogma) - it does not need me to defend it, and I can read the Bible critically, challenge both the original texts and the interpretations of it that I have been given, and continue to be given. 

My narrowly defined understanding of the Bible didn't stand up to scrutiny and it didn't stand up to meeting and learning from real human beings who didn't share my background - those of differeing ethnic and cultural backgrounds, those of different faiths, those of differing opinions. In listening and learning to those who were not like me, who did not share my particular way of believing, or my interpretative lenses. I couldn't hold on to the way I had read the Bible in the faith journey of my youth and young adulthood. In studying academic theology, then theology for ministry, and with nearly thirty years of preaching and learning about how the Bible works and doesn't work in today's world I realize that the very act of opening a Bible (literally or figuratively) is an act of interpretation and that I have a responsibility as a pastor and priest to learn what I can about our Scriptures, and to share that learning as we journey together in faith.

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