From our Cultural Perspective
We all come to the Bible with our own set of cultural filters we impose upon it.
In the West, our enthusiasm at discovering the enormous power of science to arrive at a level of communal certainty invited us to apply it to all areas of our lives. The thrill of possessing this powerful and useful hammer tempts us to see everything around us as nails.
Seeing the Bible as a nail for this hammer has both brought us great reward (we now know so much more about the Bible and the history behind it than we did 200 years) and great loss, we both abuse it and doubt it more than ever.
Our Doubts Are Our Own
Doubt always arises from our framework of certainty. If by virtue of our culture we expect certainty to come in a certain way, when our expectations are not fulfilled by the filtered reality we observe doubt is sure to follow.
The Modernist/Fundamentalist feud split the church over what it saw when it read the Bible, and that split has continued to widen.
Modernists and Fundamentalists approached the Bible with the insistence that the presentation of truth conform to their expectations. For the modernists this produced skepticism when it came to the Bible, for the Fundamentalists the fear of losing what was precious to them caused them to double down their expectations of the historical claims the Bible presents.
The portion of the Bible that became ground zero for this struggle was ironically the stories of Jesus. This is the portion of the Bible that offers us the most material in terms of witnessed accounts of events (we have 4 versions of the story whereas most of the Bible offers us one or two witnesses to history). Given the realization that in fact three of the Gospel stories were textually dependent upon one another (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and that details sometimes differed between them Modernists declared them unreliable and Fundamentalists did exegetical somersaults to prove that ALL of the details were accurate and the video tape could be reconstructed with enough harmonization.
Neither camp could see that the mostly likely source of their failure were their own cultural filters rather than the nail they kept trying to hammer into the shape of their own expectations.
The Real Story
Most of us recognize that many good story tellers sometimes don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t fact behind the story, it just means that the author is willing to take some artistic liberty with the telling of the facts to convey something of the meaning of the story as the author sees it.
We are accustomed to this practice when it comes to movie making. “Based on a true story” says a lot about what you should expect from the movie maker’s telling of the story. If you have access to accounts of the events you may judge that the movie maker has failed to convey the events accurately. The movie maker would respond “yes, but my goal here is to shape your world by telling you this story and so event telling is sometimes subservient to serve my world shaping agenda.
This of course gives us pause. Should we really learn about the Scopes trial by watching “Inherit the Wind“? Yes and no. You might learn some things about the Scopes trial but you will likely learn more about the conversation about the McCarthy trials.
Again, modernists may balk and say “the Bible is deceiving me about what it is trying to tell me, therefore it is unreliable.” You might better turn the question around and ask “what is it you imagined the Bible was trying to tell you? Did you expectations get in the way of reading it?” What did “Inherit the Wind” intend to communicate to you?
What this boils down to is of course whether or not you trust the story teller to shape your world. Conservatives claim that the Bible is “inspired”. We might sense a nuanced split between conservative “trusting that the story teller is telling the story we need to hear” and the fundamentalist “making sure all of the details match our expectations of how a detail must be conveyed for me to consider it to be true.”
Here also we see a skeptic/traditionalist split. The skeptic says “either the framing of the story is told by biased power mongers (the church) in order to prioritize their story for their own gain or the story is a product of chaos and an larger story is simply imposed upon it by those who already have their story and wish to propagate it.” The traditionalist says “the story is in the text, found by the church, put there by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit”.
The Bible as Marriage Counseling
Again we may continue to object that the Bible is leading us astray. Would this kind of witnessing being done by the Bible stand up in a court of law or in a scientist’s laboratory? We must ask whether the story teller sees those venues as the primary setting for the story to be brought.
Imagine an unhappy couple are in the counselor’s office to try to find peace in their marriage where they have only found conflict. There will certainly be a degree of story telling that goes on with the counselor. He did this, she did that, and we would very much want that story telling to be truthful. The unhappy couple will in fact likely spend a lot of time arguing the veracity of their account and denying the truthfulness of the other’s. The one demands that the story of the other is a conveniently biased tale that puts himself in a good light at the expense of the other.
Were both unclear about “the facts”? Quite likely both ARE unclear about them because their perspectives have shaped their seeing the facts.
At some point, however, the wise counselor will want the history telling to end because while it is important it is their main agenda. The history IS critical. The marriage IS real. The hurts ARE well founded, but it is the shaping of the selves and the shaping of the story and the quest for shalom that are the real goal of the work.
There is a deeper story at play in the conflict than the history telling conveys. It is a story of fear, of hurt, of rupture. Most counselors will probably assert that lots of other stories that are not being brought to the table are very much in play in the story telling by the unhappy couple. These other happy and unhappy stories have shaped the story telling the conflicting couple practices. There are stories that form their individual pasts that are working their way into the couple’s unhappy story of strife. There are stories of parents and ancestors and cultures imposing themselves upon the shaping of the selves and the stories that the combatants are retelling. The three of them in this room are in fact awash in stories and the counselor will attempt to help the couple shape a new story even with the material of their conflicted, painful stories in which there is forgiveness, and reconciliation in hope of shalom.
In many ways the Bible tells its story in this way. It is a story looking for reconciliation and shalom awash in the myriad of competing stories in the world.
Bible as Yoga
There is a lively debate going on as to whether Yoga is a religious activity. In both US courts and Indian courts this subject is being debated. What is clear if you watch the development of this is that American and Indian cultures and histories are shaping how the two cultural groups think about Yoga. Americans think about it as stretching. Indians think about it as a religious practice that leads the devotee to escape moksha. The Indian perspective easily escapes the Americans. “What does exercise and stretching have to do with imagining myself escaping the cycle of death and reincarnation?”
While scholars may forever debate the Bible itself it is beyond dispute that the Bible has shaped the story of countless believers who have employed it and submitted to it in hopes that it would bring their own stories towards shalom and healing. Employers of the Bible don’t always know why or how they pick up this book and try to apply it to their own stories, but employ they do. In many ways for Christianity devotional Bible reading is their yoga. How does it shape them? They have no idea. It just has and does.
Ignorant Bible Reading
After years at seminary, after years of studying the Bible for preaching and teaching, I am constantly reminded that I am a novice with this book. I read books and blogs by scholars with a variety of church and faith commitments know far more about the Bible than I ever will. You quickly learn at seminary that Bible learning isn’t any different from learning math or doing well in sports. Some people are simply equipped to learn original languages better than others. Some people’s brains are hard wired to do advanced scholarship better than others. Some people are located in history and have opportunities that mean that they will have access to the best teachers, the most time for scholarship, the better schools. There is no “fairness” in this and most of us are at the losing end of this lottery.
At the same time the Bible is read and applied so broadly by anyone with some ability to read. As a pastor you get to hear a lot of Biblical interpretation done by anyone off the street and as a pastor you can’t help but realize that so much of it is simply terrible. Read church history and you’ll find what strange things happen when we read the Bible for ourselves. Alister McGrath calls this Christianity’s Dangerous Idea.
At the same time all this ignorant Bible reading and application seems to regularly produce saints. Given all of the objections thrown at the Bible the degree to which it shapes simple, humble lives of sacrificial service is amazing. People give and work and pray through this book and the world is a better place for it. I see it in husbands and wives, in the homeless, in the monastery.
Self Formation
On one level our selves are stories and so it is story that shapes our selves. What Bible reading does, whether ignorant or learned, is to shape our stories. As yoga shapes the body so the story of the Bible shapes our self.
Modern skeptics will ask “why should I read this book? I can’t trust it as history (the way I understand history). I have questions about the content of many of its stories.”
Yes, we have questions. Are we asking questions about how other stories are forming our selves?
The Christian church finally comes to the Bible because of Jesus and the resurrection. What Jesus says about the Old Testament, as Christians call it, is shocking. How Jesus and the apostles use it often defies our cultural filters of “appropriate use”.
If the resurrection happened, and means what the apostles say it means (that in the resurrected flesh of Jesus the age of decay is undone and a new age without decay and loss have begun) then the Bible has to be contended with. Jesus repeatedly points to this book and says “it speaks of me” and invites us to find our own stories within its story. This is why Christians embrace the Bible as their yoga and we appropriate it, clumsy though we be, and have its story shape our own. Through the Bible and the Church (the community of the Bible that moderates our variant readings) our self is shaped, formed, remade, restored and prepared for the larger, longer, grander story that is about to unfold.
Leadingchurch.com 
Reading the Bible For Self Formation
From our Cultural Perspective
We all come to the Bible with our own set of cultural filters we impose upon it.
In the West, our enthusiasm at discovering the enormous power of science to arrive at a level of communal certainty invited us to apply it to all areas of our lives. The thrill of possessing this powerful and useful hammer tempts us to see everything around us as nails.
Seeing the Bible as a nail for this hammer has both brought us great reward (we now know so much more about the Bible and the history behind it than we did 200 years) and great loss, we both abuse it and doubt it more than ever.
Our Doubts Are Our Own
Doubt always arises from our framework of certainty. If by virtue of our culture we expect certainty to come in a certain way, when our expectations are not fulfilled by the filtered reality we observe doubt is sure to follow.
The Modernist/Fundamentalist feud split the church over what it saw when it read the Bible, and that split has continued to widen.
Modernists and Fundamentalists approached the Bible with the insistence that the presentation of truth conform to their expectations. For the modernists this produced skepticism when it came to the Bible, for the Fundamentalists the fear of losing what was precious to them caused them to double down their expectations of the historical claims the Bible presents.
The portion of the Bible that became ground zero for this struggle was ironically the stories of Jesus. This is the portion of the Bible that offers us the most material in terms of witnessed accounts of events (we have 4 versions of the story whereas most of the Bible offers us one or two witnesses to history). Given the realization that in fact three of the Gospel stories were textually dependent upon one another (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and that details sometimes differed between them Modernists declared them unreliable and Fundamentalists did exegetical somersaults to prove that ALL of the details were accurate and the video tape could be reconstructed with enough harmonization.
Neither camp could see that the mostly likely source of their failure were their own cultural filters rather than the nail they kept trying to hammer into the shape of their own expectations.
The Real Story
Most of us recognize that many good story tellers sometimes don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t fact behind the story, it just means that the author is willing to take some artistic liberty with the telling of the facts to convey something of the meaning of the story as the author sees it.
We are accustomed to this practice when it comes to movie making. “Based on a true story” says a lot about what you should expect from the movie maker’s telling of the story. If you have access to accounts of the events you may judge that the movie maker has failed to convey the events accurately. The movie maker would respond “yes, but my goal here is to shape your world by telling you this story and so event telling is sometimes subservient to serve my world shaping agenda.
This of course gives us pause. Should we really learn about the Scopes trial by watching “Inherit the Wind“? Yes and no. You might learn some things about the Scopes trial but you will likely learn more about the conversation about the McCarthy trials.
Again, modernists may balk and say “the Bible is deceiving me about what it is trying to tell me, therefore it is unreliable.” You might better turn the question around and ask “what is it you imagined the Bible was trying to tell you? Did you expectations get in the way of reading it?” What did “Inherit the Wind” intend to communicate to you?
What this boils down to is of course whether or not you trust the story teller to shape your world. Conservatives claim that the Bible is “inspired”. We might sense a nuanced split between conservative “trusting that the story teller is telling the story we need to hear” and the fundamentalist “making sure all of the details match our expectations of how a detail must be conveyed for me to consider it to be true.”
Here also we see a skeptic/traditionalist split. The skeptic says “either the framing of the story is told by biased power mongers (the church) in order to prioritize their story for their own gain or the story is a product of chaos and an larger story is simply imposed upon it by those who already have their story and wish to propagate it.” The traditionalist says “the story is in the text, found by the church, put there by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit”.
The Bible as Marriage Counseling
Again we may continue to object that the Bible is leading us astray. Would this kind of witnessing being done by the Bible stand up in a court of law or in a scientist’s laboratory? We must ask whether the story teller sees those venues as the primary setting for the story to be brought.
Imagine an unhappy couple are in the counselor’s office to try to find peace in their marriage where they have only found conflict. There will certainly be a degree of story telling that goes on with the counselor. He did this, she did that, and we would very much want that story telling to be truthful. The unhappy couple will in fact likely spend a lot of time arguing the veracity of their account and denying the truthfulness of the other’s. The one demands that the story of the other is a conveniently biased tale that puts himself in a good light at the expense of the other.
Were both unclear about “the facts”? Quite likely both ARE unclear about them because their perspectives have shaped their seeing the facts.
At some point, however, the wise counselor will want the history telling to end because while it is important it is their main agenda. The history IS critical. The marriage IS real. The hurts ARE well founded, but it is the shaping of the selves and the shaping of the story and the quest for shalom that are the real goal of the work.
There is a deeper story at play in the conflict than the history telling conveys. It is a story of fear, of hurt, of rupture. Most counselors will probably assert that lots of other stories that are not being brought to the table are very much in play in the story telling by the unhappy couple. These other happy and unhappy stories have shaped the story telling the conflicting couple practices. There are stories that form their individual pasts that are working their way into the couple’s unhappy story of strife. There are stories of parents and ancestors and cultures imposing themselves upon the shaping of the selves and the stories that the combatants are retelling. The three of them in this room are in fact awash in stories and the counselor will attempt to help the couple shape a new story even with the material of their conflicted, painful stories in which there is forgiveness, and reconciliation in hope of shalom.
In many ways the Bible tells its story in this way. It is a story looking for reconciliation and shalom awash in the myriad of competing stories in the world.
Bible as Yoga
There is a lively debate going on as to whether Yoga is a religious activity. In both US courts and Indian courts this subject is being debated. What is clear if you watch the development of this is that American and Indian cultures and histories are shaping how the two cultural groups think about Yoga. Americans think about it as stretching. Indians think about it as a religious practice that leads the devotee to escape moksha. The Indian perspective easily escapes the Americans. “What does exercise and stretching have to do with imagining myself escaping the cycle of death and reincarnation?”
While scholars may forever debate the Bible itself it is beyond dispute that the Bible has shaped the story of countless believers who have employed it and submitted to it in hopes that it would bring their own stories towards shalom and healing. Employers of the Bible don’t always know why or how they pick up this book and try to apply it to their own stories, but employ they do. In many ways for Christianity devotional Bible reading is their yoga. How does it shape them? They have no idea. It just has and does.
Ignorant Bible Reading
After years at seminary, after years of studying the Bible for preaching and teaching, I am constantly reminded that I am a novice with this book. I read books and blogs by scholars with a variety of church and faith commitments know far more about the Bible than I ever will. You quickly learn at seminary that Bible learning isn’t any different from learning math or doing well in sports. Some people are simply equipped to learn original languages better than others. Some people’s brains are hard wired to do advanced scholarship better than others. Some people are located in history and have opportunities that mean that they will have access to the best teachers, the most time for scholarship, the better schools. There is no “fairness” in this and most of us are at the losing end of this lottery.
At the same time the Bible is read and applied so broadly by anyone with some ability to read. As a pastor you get to hear a lot of Biblical interpretation done by anyone off the street and as a pastor you can’t help but realize that so much of it is simply terrible. Read church history and you’ll find what strange things happen when we read the Bible for ourselves. Alister McGrath calls this Christianity’s Dangerous Idea.
At the same time all this ignorant Bible reading and application seems to regularly produce saints. Given all of the objections thrown at the Bible the degree to which it shapes simple, humble lives of sacrificial service is amazing. People give and work and pray through this book and the world is a better place for it. I see it in husbands and wives, in the homeless, in the monastery.
Self Formation
On one level our selves are stories and so it is story that shapes our selves. What Bible reading does, whether ignorant or learned, is to shape our stories. As yoga shapes the body so the story of the Bible shapes our self.
Modern skeptics will ask “why should I read this book? I can’t trust it as history (the way I understand history). I have questions about the content of many of its stories.”
Yes, we have questions. Are we asking questions about how other stories are forming our selves?
The Christian church finally comes to the Bible because of Jesus and the resurrection. What Jesus says about the Old Testament, as Christians call it, is shocking. How Jesus and the apostles use it often defies our cultural filters of “appropriate use”.
If the resurrection happened, and means what the apostles say it means (that in the resurrected flesh of Jesus the age of decay is undone and a new age without decay and loss have begun) then the Bible has to be contended with. Jesus repeatedly points to this book and says “it speaks of me” and invites us to find our own stories within its story. This is why Christians embrace the Bible as their yoga and we appropriate it, clumsy though we be, and have its story shape our own. Through the Bible and the Church (the community of the Bible that moderates our variant readings) our self is shaped, formed, remade, restored and prepared for the larger, longer, grander story that is about to unfold.
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About PaulVK
Husband, Father of 5, Pastor