Many of us who read scripture and want to honor it as a special sort of text, a text somehow set apart from all others, spend a great deal of time discerning how we should read such a text. As a result, we come to scripture with expectations about what scripture is and what it should do to us or for us. Put another way: we confess that scripture is the word of God before we ever sit down and read it.
Yet it seems to me that this confession should come after we have read. We should read our bibles the way we would read any other book, with questions and curiosity, eager to find some pattern of words that truthfully names reality and excites our thought. Because it is only as we take our bible down from its own secluded shelf and place it among The Republic, and Macbeth, and Brothers Karamazov , and the Collected Poems of Robert Frost that we begin to understand what a treasure it is. Just as the centurion crucified Jesus as another common criminal and only then recognized him as the Son of God, so we read the bible as another common text and only then recognize it as the word of God.
WE ARE MOVING!
11 years ago
1 comment:
hmmm I really like this post because this is something I think I struggle with - even to the extent of after I read I don't know how to take what I read because depending on the translation the meaning could be ambiguous, or if like somehow the way I am reading is wrong.
it will definitely be a new perspective to try and read it as a "common text"
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