I am often saddened by the thought that we have a famine of God’s word yet we live in an age when we have more access to it than ever before. We can read it in books, on our phones, kindles, ipads, computers, online, and if we can’t read it we can listen it to on a free App! But many Christians are seriously malnourished. We know that the un-churched have lost the cultural knowledge of the bible but many churched folk have lost it too. What riches they are missing!
Steve Chalke has recently called for a worldwide dialogue about how we should understand the bible and apply it to the new challenges that face each generation. I suggest one of our first challenges is to encourage each generation to read it. But he raises an important point that those who do engage with the bible struggle to put it together:
Many Christians – let alone anyone else – sometimes wonder if it might be best to consign large chunks of it to a filing cabinet labelled ‘no longer relevant. [1]
If you trace Steve Chalke’s journey it is evident that this statement describes his own experience. The bible does contain things that leave us feeling uncomfortable, it contains ideas that do not fit with our perception of the world, it contains things that we would rather not read: it is by its nature God’s word not man’s word. It was written through men but it is divinely inspired and fully trustworthy; it contains huge variations in style, literary form and language; it was written in ancient languages we need to translate in short as Dan Strange recently said “the bible is messy in a good way”[2]. That the bible disturbs us is no surprise – it is a two edged sword that cuts us to the core. But when God’s word cuts we must not change the word to make it blunt or only read our favourite bits in isolation– no we are called to repent and believe!
In the past the Reformation leaders fought to establish the authority of the word over the authority of the church. In the 20th Century evangelicals stood up for the credibility of the word against modernist liberals who denied the miraculous and the possibility of its truth. In the latter part of the 20th Century there was a need to stand up for the sufficiency of the word against those who believed the Spirit brought fresh revelations that were separate from the word. But today the battle is over hermeneutics- how we understand it. Steve Chalke is not alone in denying the nature of the bible. The battles we face today have arisen from postmodernist thinking and many have absorbed a wrong view of interpretation by osmosis. The current debates over the role of women in the church, gay marriage and Rob Bell’s views on hell are not coming from those who say they deny scripture, but from those who say that they interpret it differently.
Many Christians who don’t read the bible fail to read it because they hit large chunks that they don’t understand. Others who do read it stick with the small bits that they do understand and avoid large swathes. Still others have been persuaded that the bible is a fallible human document which contains ideas that we have grown out of and if you hold to that doctrine of scripture there is little point spending hours searching its pages: that might as well be left to a few specialists.
There is a right way to read the bible! But are people in our churches being taught this? Steve Chalke wants to debate how we interpret scripture; I want to encourage us to teach people to read and interpret scripture. Lets give them the tools they need to really read God’s word, to discover its riches and beauty. Small group bible studies or one to ones are an excellent way of helping one another to correctly handle the word of truth against those who affirm it but read it with a postmodern mind-set. When we lead bible studies we are helping others to read the text so as to understand the passage, modelling the questions we should ask of a text and submitting to its authority.
The bible is God’s word and can stand up to our most rigorous scrutiny. The more we read the bible as a whole, not missing anything out the more we see how it fits together. We must help each other do this. We need to make sure that the next generation knows how to read the bible and why. And the best way to do this is to unleash the word and not a debate.
[1] Rev. Steve Chalke, ‘Restoring Confidence in the Bible’ (accessed 10 March 2014) http://www.oasisuk.org/theologyresources/restoringconfidence