by Kevin Burton
It was refreshing and helpful to receive in the mail recently, the booklet “What Every Christian Needs To Know About Reading The Bible” from Our Daily Bread Ministries.
There is no other book like the Bible. It can certainly be confusing and intimidating to read. Author Kevin J. Vanhoozer has given us an overview, a means of keeping the individual passages of the Bible in context.
In a previous post we took from his first two chapters that scripture is “a word from heaven for citizens of heaven,” and that scripture is about “one holy nation under God.” (How To Read And Understand The Bible, June. 16).
In chapter four we looked at why it is important to read the Bible correctly, because your salvation and eternal destination depend on it.
“All scripture is useful for training disciples in righteousness, for being right with God and doing what is right,” Vanhoozer writes. “Both discipleship and heavenly citizenship depend on reading the Bible rightly.”
I skipped over chapter three to give it more attention in its own post today. There, Vanhoozer fills in some of the blanks, with five lessons for how to read scripture.
Lesson one: Keep your eye on the ball, the big picture.
+3“Don’t so fixate on the trees, (particular people, things or events) that you lose your way to the forest (the whole story).
“Literacy means knowing how to read and write. Reading involves more than deciphering individual words, however. Biblical literacy means not only understanding the individual words but the flow of the overarching story,” Vanhoozer writes. “Each part of the Bible makes sense only in light of the whole. The whole is the story of how God is forming a holy nation.”
Vanhoozer then writes about “canon sense,” which means knowing how the different parts of the Bible fit together.
“For example, Hebrews explains that all the priests, sacrifices and kings of the Old testament were simply placeholders pointing to the real thing, Jesus Christ.” Vanhoozer writes.
Lesson two: Identify and then respect, what kind of text you are reading.
“The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship, from a corkscrew to a cathedral, is to know what it is, what it was intended to do and how it is to be used,” wrote British theologian CS Lewis.
The Bible employs many kinds and styles of writing to tell the story. Read them and understand them for what they are.
“There are many kinds of maps in the biblical atlas,” Vanhoozer writes. “Each map has its own key and legend. So read history as history, poetry as poetry, law as law, and so forth.”
“Not everything in the Bible is straightforward history. Jesus taught by telling parables and these are not to be read historically. The point of these short stories was to challenge the listener’s conventional pictures of the kingdom of God.”
Lesson three: Every portion of the Bible is directly or indirectly about Jesus.
“What frames each biblical book is the overarching story of God’s words and deeds,” Vanhoozer writes. “And everything – beginning, middle and end – comes together in the word made flesh, Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus is the hub around which the various textual spokes of the Bible turn. If the Bible is a set of maps leading to the city of God, then Jesus is the orienting North Star.”
Lesson four: You and I are not the first people to read the Bible.
“Jesus promised His disciples that He would send then the Holy Spirit: “he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). We believe he has done just that over the centuries and across the cultures.”
“Illuminated by the Spirit, the early church formulated a ‘Rule of Faith’ summarizing what every Christian should know, core knowledge of the gospel.
“Though the rule does not have an independent authority, readers today do well to consult it. If nothing else it serves as a precious guardrail against stubborn heretics who insist on reading the Bible in their own idiosyncratic ways,” Vanhoozer writes.
You are not free to put your private interpretation onto God’s word.
Lesson five: Reading rightly requires us to be readers and doers of God’s word.
Vanhoozer said without this fifth lesson the other four are rendered useless.
“Doing God’s story means accepting it as the true story of the world and our lives,” Vanhoozer wrote. He then points to Galatians 2: 20, which in the NASB reads, “ I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
“Doing God’s story means participating in it. Paul accepted the gospel as true and sought to live it out,” Vanhoozer writes.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” 2 Cor. 5:17 NASB).
“To read the Bible rightly ultimately requires that we read our lives in its light, for it is the one true s story of God, the world, and ourselves.”
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