I
love Wikipedia. It is among my most frequently visited websites. When I'm
bored, have a random question, or want to refresh my knowledge on topics I
learn in college, I turn to Wikipedia. It's a beautiful thing.
But
the Bible is not like Wikipedia, no matter how often we try to make it so. Here
are a few reasons why not:
1. It
does not answer our every question. The Bible is a narrative. It has an author
and an author's message/story to us telling us what He intends. Selfishly
we want the Bible to provide us with an omniscient objective point of view over
all of history, which we can evaluate and judge based upon our own understanding. Sorry we don't get to be
omniscient, that's just part of finitude. Some questions are left unanswered.
2. We don't get
to edit it to say what we want/think it should say. It edits us.
3. We have to
study it and discover what God was saying and is saying, which means we need to
do our homework and be careful. When reading the Bible is all too easy to
interpret a passage through my own cultural understanding. The problem is importing
my culture, my ideas, my paradigm is inadvertently editorial.
To properly understand
scripture we have to understand culture; both our own and that of the original
audience. People have always existed within a culture and cultural context. The
difficulty for us arises when our own culture is separated from the original author
and audience’s culture by, say language and a couple thousand years. To assume
that I can read a text written to another audience in another culture at
another time, without considering or trying to understand the original author's
culture and the original audience's culture is arrogant. There is no book in
the Bible written to Tim with his Western 21st Century Post-Enlightenment
paradigm, so I guess I will have some studying to do.
But the good news is, the
more I learn about the Bible, the context, and the cultures, the richer my
understanding of the Bible becomes. I love Jesus, but the more I understand
what His words and actions meant in First Century Palestine under Roman
oppression, the more I am challenged and inspired. Future posts on some
examples to come.
