Learning From the Bible

The Scriptures as the Spirit's tool

Spiritual Resources > Spiritual Disciplines > Studying the Bible

STARTING OUT

If you were asking yourself, "why should I read the Bible?" and it leads you to want to read it, but you don't know how to go about it, that's okay. If it's even a small part of what is claimed, this is no ordinary reading experience. But it needs to be started in a simple way, to get some solid ground under your feet.

The first item on your list is to get yourself a good study bible. (You can't study the Bible without a Bible!) English-language translations abound, and you can get lost in an alphabet soup of initials -- NAB, KJV, NASV, TEV, CEV, JB, and so on. For most people, the best choices would be the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and the New International Version (NIV), because they're easily read yet not dumbed down, and both are available in many study editions. There are still some who insist on the King James Version (KJV), the official English translation from over 500 years ago. Since I often read old forms of English from being an amateur Germanic-family linguist, it's an easy read for me. Yet, most of the time, I use the NRSV, because I usually read Scripture not to enjoy languages but to have my life transformed. Spirithome.com uses the NIV, as kindly provided in links from the Bible Gateway.

For those who want to dig into the Bible for the first time, a good study bible is a good friend. It has maps, concordances, cross-references, word and name meanings, and basic blurbs on the cultures, religions, and powers of Biblical times. Such information helps to set the context for each era in the Testaments. You can also turn to paraphrases, which restate the writings for a (hopefully) clearer grasp of its meaning. The only one of those I can recommend is Eugene Peterson's The Message, because he's so good and so sound at it. His work will hit home to you after only a short reading, and hits home even to those who have been reading the Bible all their lives.

About Studying the Bible

The next matter at hand is how to go about Bible studies. I hope not like most of us studied in high school, dreaming of who you were dating Saturday night, or of future glories, or of just lazing around. Each of us needs two basic arenas for Bible study.

The first is self-study -- spending time on your own prayerfully reading the Bible. It can be done book-by-book, or by theme, or based on a daily lectionary (a formal selection of key passages). Self-study is intimate, you and the Spirit who speaks through its pages. It's said that the Bible reads you as much as you read it; you can see yourself through divine eyes. When I studied the Bible as a young adult, I did it the same obsessive way I studied college course subjects, by totally immersing myself weekends at a time just on one subject. I would use several study bibles, books, library time, letters, phone calls, articles, praying and meditating and endlessly thinking. What I soon learned is that to really get a handle on what the Spirit is saying, I needed to be with people and get a life.

That realization leads us into the second arena: study with others, face to face. Most often in church, at a house, or on campus. A good study and fellowship group is like nothing else in teaching us about how to live the faith.

Remember that the purpose of learning the Bible is to live by it in the love of its divine Author. Otherwise, why bother? After a while, the Bible starts to become your lens for seeing the world as it is, and for seeing yourself. The objective is to get it so thoroughly into you that you normally think in its terms. In that way, the Spirit uses it to reshape you. And as that happens, the Bible becomes Scripture for you.

WE ARE NOT ALONE.....

The Bible is very well suited for private study. But it is even better suited for study with others. It wasn't made to be used primarily in solitude. It is God's Word spoken to you, but it is also God's Word for all of those who believe in God. That's why it's good to bounce your thoughts off of others, and hearing what others think, taking advantage of Jesus's promise about being where two or three (or more) are gathered. Otherwise, we'd miss too much. Our blind spots, our prejudices, even our being mere limited beings can get in the way. Studying and sharing with others is a way you can discern what the Spirit is telling you, because the Spirit is telling them too, and they (or you) might be hearing the Spirit more clearly at the moment. Then, there's also the voices of thousands of years of other believers, Jewish and Christian, who have been doing what you're doing, thinking about it, and coming up with penetrating insight and moves of sheer genius. They're not stupid; God got through to many of them. When you study the Bible with feedback from other voices, you're being open to the voice of the Spirit that speaks through them. Or, you might be the Spirit's voice for those others. You may not know which. So share it! Commit to your study group : "I will be there; I will ask questions; I will share what I have; I will listen." A good supplement to that is Net-based chat study groups.

LEARNING FROM THE BIBLE

As Christians see it, the Bible's purpose is to lead us to love God, and lead us into the good news of Christ and His coming Kingdom. It is all fulfilled in Christ -- so says Scripture! This is where all interpretation starts and ends, and is the principle that leads the steps that follow. But we're at neither the start nor the end. The pillar of fire is not before us, nor can we walk up to Jesus and ask him a question. We're in a different time and place and situation, and live in a life with endless complications that were not even dreamt of ere long ago. So we are left with the task of having to figure out what the Spirit is saying to us in that passage. What is the Spirit up to? What is the creative Spirit creating, shaping, or teaching through it? But we are not left alone; God has sent the Spirit to guide us -- God wants us to know. This much all Christians trust, and so all can start from there when reading Scripture.

This means that the Bible is never an objective, unbiased source. It wasn't meant to be. It never claimed to be. Every book in it is meant not to be read as if they were. It serves a purpose, and is totally, lovingly, celebratively biased toward that purpose. The most important of all purposes.

From that point on, Christians use so many methods for interpreting the Bible that I won't even try to count them. (Even when you use no method, you're still using a method -- by which I mean that no interpretation comes out of thin air. There's a way which led to the interpretations.) I'll give you my own way; maybe as you read it, you might recognize what you do. My questions can start at any point along the way, but sooner or later must face up to all the other parts of the process.

The next principle is that Scripture interprets Scripture -- what the Spirit's telling us through Scripture is unlocked by, tested by, qualified by, and balanced by, the rest of Scripture. This does not force us to treat any part of it as if it were without human failings or error; the only way people of today can really trust the truth of something like that is if they discover it for themselves. No part of the Bible is slighted or ignored -- but no part of it stands on its own.

There's a current school of thought called 'the narrative method' which comes in here. The 'context' for everything in the Bible is its overall story line or 'meta-narrative'. All parts of the story find their meaning within the course of the overall story. The method isn't without its problems. The story is much greater than the sum of its parts, but you can't really know the story without grasping its parts, especially when the story develops from real life. Each passage, even each word, must have its full due and not be dismissed, even the most disgusting parts, even when it seems to go against the narrative. That said, the 'narrative' methods focus on what's most important about the Bible. The rest of it may be good to know, helpful, and even God's blessing for you, but it is the overall story line that gives us the 'why' for each Bible passage's being there.

Another principle is to interpret it prayerfully and devotionally. If you're not communicating with God about it, meditating on it, and doing the things which surrender more and more of your being to God, you won't hear the Spirit even if your mind comes to good factual conclusions on the matter at hand. (This is also why it is so important to fill worship services with Bible passages and language. Its use in worship helps keep our souls open and thankful to the God of the Bible.)

Next, hear what others said and say today about what a Scriptural passage means. Pay attention to :

1. 2000 years of faithful yet sinful Christians, and 3000 years of Jews;
2. the circle of believers you have fellowship with in your day-to-day life, including your pastor;
3. the billion other Christians alive today;
4. non-Christians who have honestly grappled with either the Scriptural passage or the subject matter at hand. This would include the thoughts of sages, authors, experts, and even the scriptures of other faiths (when treated in the same non-authoritative manner as sages and authors).

The Spirit may have led them to understandings you'd never have thought of. The Spirit worked through the Bible to build and shape the faith community and the people in it. That tells us something about where the Spirit is taking us (and you) today.

Next, God gave you the ability to think for yourself. You can reason, figure things out, research, probe, and question. Use science, history, sociology, physics, and psychology. Use what you've learned over the years. The Spirit can work through your thinking. When Scripture has trained the mind, the Scripturally-shaped mind is then set free to understand the Testaments.

Within someone who prepares themselves aright in the other ways above, the Spirit can use their feelings, conscience, and intuitions to help guide them. Gut instinct and powerful emotion are no more (or less) sinful than anything else about you. But they must be shaped and given boundaries through the other checks, or they will tyrannize you. Sometimes it seems like thoughts and feelings as opposing sources that fight against each other. But there are ways they can work together. For instance, allow the Spirit to use the Bible to help you (and those you study with) imagine that passage of the Bible being lived out in your world. Or, picture yourself in Scriptural events, through the people who lived those events.

This process of sifting through your Bible readings can be like a conversation with God (just like prayer) or a lifelong series of mails between you and God. Or maybe a weird kind of Q-and-A which sometimes becomes Q-and-Q, where God answers you back with a question. If you're listening for it, it can be great to share your hopes, feelings, or thoughts with God. For me, it sometimes feels like a ping-pong match, where God fires back fast with a lot of spin and twist. It can get pretty intense, and it can sting where the ball hits you. Your part of the process is to pay close attention. It might be a thought that keeps coming to mind, or something that's happening around you as you go through the day, or an opportunity that arrives, or something someone says that throws you back to something you had earlier read in the Bible. In that way, it's an ongoing process that follows you through your daily life. It is to be learned, felt, and acted upon in the light of the wider Scriptural witness to God's redeeming purpose through Christ.

There are other things (specialized gifts, extraordinary circumstances and such), but they would come under these principles.

Within the above framework, humans are not exalted above Scripture, and no part of the Bible is simply ignored or interpreted away or rendered invalid. None of these steps are strictly 'natural'; all have a supra-natural agency, someone beyond nature -- the Spirit -- at work. The fallibility level rises as one goes down the list, but there's always the other principles to keep that in check. The wise Christian turns these into a set of habits and patterns, a work ethic that becomes a part of our normal day-to-day way of living and learning. The wise Christian community trains us in these patterns from cradle to grave, and commits itself to live by what the Spirit shows us through the biblical Scriptures. Learning the Bible is as complex as life itself; it contains libraries worth of gray areas and galleries full of multiple facets and sparkling colors.

No matter how you study the Bible, it's all a waste of time if you don't allow what you find there to penetrate your life. If God really is God, the One with full authority over us (or in churchspeak, our 'Lord'), then what God tells us is of the highest importance to us. And that means the Bible before it means anything else. It's not there for you to just know, but for you to believe and live by. Or as John put it near the end of his Gospel :

"Jesus also did many other signs in the disciples' presence that are not written in this book. But these have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that in believing, you may have life in his Name." (John 20:30-31).

Learning about the Bible, and even learning the Bible itself thoroughly, is not as crucial as learning from the Bible, and even that is not as valuable as living in the way of the God of the Bible. Our task as Bible readers is to surrender ourselves to the Spirit who speaks through it.
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IS IT MEANT FOR YOU?

Not everything that's said in the Bible was meant for everyone at all times. For instance, not everyone is called upon to sell all that they own and give it to the poor. Yet, that calling may well be what God wants from you, just as it was for Francis of Assisi and many others throughout the centuries. You're in a different situation than the young rich man Jesus commanded to do it. You have different possibilities, responsibilities, and complications, and the stumbling blocks to your faith may be very different. Remember that there was a crowd present when Jesus challenged the young man. Jesus didn't directly give them the same challenge. But just as it's wrong to presume that it applies to you, it is also wrong to be sure that it doesn't. The Spirit may well be trying to tell you something. Use methods of discernment to help you find out.

When a word doesn't directly apply to you, it still has an important message, and it's wise to come to grips with it. For instance, even if you aren't one of those who is called to give up all you have, the episode has a lesson which applies to us all: we cannot serve both God and wealth. All of us have to struggle with how that works out in our lives. Just because the specific situation doesn't apply to you doesn't make it any less Scripture. God is still saying something to you, and you ought to get to know what it is.

  Other sources:

• Bible Ministries
• an emerging-church bible study
• Lectionary-based download, focused on discipleship
• downloadable lessons on learning from the Bible
• Audio from Anglicans @ University of New South Wales, Australia

Try These for learning from the Bible:

1. Describe what you experience when reading or hearing Scripture. (I don't mean what you're 'supposed to' experience. What you do experience.)
2. Choose a book of the Bible you've never read before, and read it aloud at the loudness and speed you would use in ordinary speech. Read it all the way through, even the technical parts. This can be done a chapter or two a day, which gives you more time to think about it.
3. Or, choose a poetic passage, such as in the Psalms, Song of Songs, or Lamentations. Read it aloud, slowly, giving yourself time to savor it and let it sink in.
4. Name one thing you have learned from the Scriptures.
5. When you're studying the Gospel, try memorizing some of the key summary lines Jesus says, or some of the promises Jesus makes for His followers.
6. If you're reading the Bible in a church study group, try asking yourselves the question: What does Scripture say about our part in the mission of Christ's followers, acting together as his Body?

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