i am sparticus: How To Read The Bible

How To Read The Bible

Phil Brown asks:

"What is a 'safe' alternative to the dispensationalist framework to interpreting the bible - in particular the notion that the bible must be "understood plainly unless it would do violence to the text"? "

The problem with reading the Bible as "understood plainly" is that in ambiguous cases you are the person who decides what is plain and what is not. Have you ever seen a film where afterwards you go "well it's obvious he really loved her all along" and the person you saw it with went "clearly that is not true, he fell back in love with her when she appeared at the ball with the silver dress on"? Or better yet have you ever been to Starbucks with Me and Gareth and heard us debate the sexuality of that male barista? To me he's plainly not gay, he just acts it in a foolish attempt to get close to the ladies. To Gareth he is obviously as gay as a kite¹. If a case is ambiguous then your individual personality and beliefs sets the meaning of the text for you. And while you can appeal to a higher source of truth to find out the reality in most circumstances - with a film you can watch the DVD directors commentary and with someone's sexuality you can ask them² - you can't do that with your interpretation of the Bible because the Bible is the highest source of truth and your interpretation is plainly correct.

So, how should you interpret the Bible? Well, I'm no expert on this so what I say here is going to be very simple and very basic. Anything more than that and I shall be parlerai hors de mon derrière. But basically; you should interpret the bible as the bible interprets itself. Or said in perhaps a slightly more comprehensible way, you should understand the Bible as the Bible understands itself. Therefore the Bible sets how you interpret the Bible. And the Bible is written as 66 books of differing styles and authors inspired and made infallible by God making up one complete book that reveals God's plan for creation and for humanity and profoundly centring on Jesus Christ³. It is useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking and training in righteous for every Christian ever. It's consistent and un-contradicting across the whole. Most importantly the Bible is a book designed to change your life and affect you. Reading it as a cold distant book is not the way the Bible should be read and reading it that way will lead to error. The Bible can only be read and should only be read (at least by Christians) as God speaking to us now telling us about Himself.

So when you read Revelation 1:9-11 and it says:

"I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, "Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea."

you'd say "well John is writing this as an account of a vision he had and he's sending it to the churches in the North Eastern part of the Mediterranean who were under-going persecution at the time." You wouldn't say "this is an account of how the world ends" because that's not what John set down to write, that's not how the Bible understands itself. Also it fails the test of being teaching, correcting, rebuking and training in righteousness for every Christian. Imagine the churches John writes to, who are suffering immense persecution, getting a letter saying "hey, if you're interested here's how the Antichrist is going to use barcodes and computer chips to take over the world, oh and by the way all Christians will disappear from the face of the earth before that knowledge will be of any real use". They might not be best pleased.

In summary, the best way to understand the bible is as the bible understands itself, reading it as a child of God seeking to learn from it.

¹ I think this is the correct expression. If not, it's a good one.

² We found out in the end, Gareth was right.

³ Some people would say that the bible is not such a cohesive whole and that it's more lots of little bits with Christ being the biggest of the bits, or the thing that appears in most bits. These people are wrong. It's all about Christ and it's all about the story that leads to Him.

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