Post by hume on Feb 18, 2007 16:36:41 GMT -8
Originally posted 2/11/06:
My recollection of how (in my childhood charismatic "Jesus People"-style church) I was trained to use the bible is vague, because the training was vague. It's barely an exaggeration to say that I was handed a bible and told to read it. Alot. The solution to confusion over scriptural passages was just, "Are you reading the bible daily? You must not be reading it enough." I didn't really read it very much in any case, let alone with any sense of how the whole thing hangs together. As a result, entire books like Revelation made little sense to me. Other passages I thought I understood ("after all, I'm just reading the plain sense of it!"), only to discover years later that I'd completely misconstrued them because I was unaware of crucial background information.
Evangelicals have a characteristic approach to reading scriptures -- perhaps a natural outgrowth of the theory of sola scriptura, which encourages a high degree of independence: there's the bible, and there's me, and God speaks directly to me through the text. That's it. This encourages the attitude that outside information, context supplied from history or the study of ancient literary genres or archaeology (or perhaps even from elsewhere in the scriptures), is irrelevant -- after all, that stuff's not the bible, so why should I give it any weight?
This is a generalization -- after all, fundamentalists do respect certain concordances and study bibles, and they take seriously their pastor's interpretations -- but it's a clear and important tendency. It explains why evangelicals "throw verses at each other" to settle disputes. Concern for context is not quite "natural" to evangelicals -- they have to keep reminding each other about it because it's a characteristic blind spot.
As Ken Collins puts it, the danger here is that people can fail to realize "when they are reading things into Scripture that aren’t there" and to "distinguish between what the Bible says and what they would like it to say."
He continues: "If it were true that the reader is not a factor, that the text stands alone, and that simply reading the Bible reveals the truth, then everyone who has this view would be unanimous in their beliefs. They aren’t." This is incidentally a common charge leveled by Catholics and the Orthodox against Protestantism: if sola scriptura is the right way to discover doctrine, why does its application lead to an almost comical profusion of conflicting doctrines and ever-branching, ever-splitting communions?
(Of course, the article also discusses the inverse error: the "liberal Protestant" reader's tendency to dominate, belittle, and underestimate scripture ...)
My recollection of how (in my childhood charismatic "Jesus People"-style church) I was trained to use the bible is vague, because the training was vague. It's barely an exaggeration to say that I was handed a bible and told to read it. Alot. The solution to confusion over scriptural passages was just, "Are you reading the bible daily? You must not be reading it enough." I didn't really read it very much in any case, let alone with any sense of how the whole thing hangs together. As a result, entire books like Revelation made little sense to me. Other passages I thought I understood ("after all, I'm just reading the plain sense of it!"), only to discover years later that I'd completely misconstrued them because I was unaware of crucial background information.
Evangelicals have a characteristic approach to reading scriptures -- perhaps a natural outgrowth of the theory of sola scriptura, which encourages a high degree of independence: there's the bible, and there's me, and God speaks directly to me through the text. That's it. This encourages the attitude that outside information, context supplied from history or the study of ancient literary genres or archaeology (or perhaps even from elsewhere in the scriptures), is irrelevant -- after all, that stuff's not the bible, so why should I give it any weight?
This is a generalization -- after all, fundamentalists do respect certain concordances and study bibles, and they take seriously their pastor's interpretations -- but it's a clear and important tendency. It explains why evangelicals "throw verses at each other" to settle disputes. Concern for context is not quite "natural" to evangelicals -- they have to keep reminding each other about it because it's a characteristic blind spot.
As Ken Collins puts it, the danger here is that people can fail to realize "when they are reading things into Scripture that aren’t there" and to "distinguish between what the Bible says and what they would like it to say."
He continues: "If it were true that the reader is not a factor, that the text stands alone, and that simply reading the Bible reveals the truth, then everyone who has this view would be unanimous in their beliefs. They aren’t." This is incidentally a common charge leveled by Catholics and the Orthodox against Protestantism: if sola scriptura is the right way to discover doctrine, why does its application lead to an almost comical profusion of conflicting doctrines and ever-branching, ever-splitting communions?
(Of course, the article also discusses the inverse error: the "liberal Protestant" reader's tendency to dominate, belittle, and underestimate scripture ...)
