Read your Bible as a whole, not clipped in to parts and pieces. Some people dissect it so much that the writers themselves wouldn't recognise it. What if we did that to a human skeleton, a newspaper or a bicycle? The result would be pretty useless.
Read the story as a whole. What was God revealing through His actions and interactions with people throughout history? What did He want to accomplish through His Son, Jesus?
Understanding the Bible is not as hard as we sometimes make it out to be. Look at Jesus. Look at how He treated people, responded to oppression, and abuse of power. Listen to what He said about priorities, relationships and the meaning of life. Read it as a novel, as a history book, a comedy, a tragedy and a thriller. Parts of it are graphic, both in sexuality and violence! John the Baptist lost his head over another man's wife being with another man!
In Acts 17 we read about the Bereans who received the word with all eagerness,examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. They were keen, but not gullible. They checked and confirmed before they accepted. We must have integrity in what we believe, being self-feeders and laying strong foundations for our faith.
Uhm, that analogy isn't quite right, because a strong foundation might seem rigid and immovable, not a good thing in earthquake zones. We must know what we believe, why we believe it, but always remain open to a fuller understanding of God and His ways, His character and nature.
Rather than a certainty that is rigid and therefore fragile, a proper confidence, as Lesslie Newbigin proposed, will see us through a lifetime of faith, failure, fractures and fulfillment, but with a flexibility that will cope with Modernism, Post-Modernism and whatever we're in now.
I've been a student for decades and have been teaching for a long time. If I stop learning, I do a disservice to those who have invested in me and to those who might benefit from my teaching. Just like a love affair, we must keep our relationship with God fresh and vital, with confidence,
but no assumptions.
For more on a comprehensive understanding of God's Story as a unified narrative, read The Insect & The Buffalo by Andrew Shamy and Roshan Allpress. Get it from Compass or download the first chapter.
Check the following example from Church History of lifelong learning and restoration of the gospel from a corrupted path. Linacre, Colet, and the Protestant Reformation
As a professor of philosophy at Oxford, Thomas Linacre founded the Department for Greek Studies. He did this after a two-year sojourn to Italy to learn Greek himself. Upon returning to Oxford, Linacre discovered that the Greek manuscripts were dramatically different from the Latin Vulgate. He wrote in his diary, “Either this (the original Greek) is not the Gospel… or we are not Christians”. The Latin Vulgate had become progressively more and more corrupted with each passing generation over the previous 1,000 years.
Linacre notified John Colet, another Oxford professor, and Colet was inspired to follow in Linacre’s footsteps and take a two-year sabbatical to Italy to study Greek. Upon returning to Oxford, Colet assisted Linacre in the production of the first Greek grammar book printed in England. The work of Colet and Linacre contributed greatly to the public awareness that the Roman Catholic Church’s Latin Vulgate text could not be trusted, and called for Christian scholars to return to the original Greek manuscripts to translate, or at least to understand, the Gospel as it was originally meant to be communicated.
For a condensed but revealing timeline of how we got the English Bible check out Greatsite.com.
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