The Bible is not like Wikipedia

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.