How to read the Bible in 2010

Listening to: Andrew Bird: Noble Beasts

We're starting a New Year and so for many people its time to restart that Bible reading plan, or at least resolve to try and read the Bible more regularly. But more important than just reading the Bible is how we do it, or what use we make of it. I often come to reading the Bible with no aim whatsoever - more fool me. We should ask "what is the Bible for?" Here are three possible answers:

1. To bring Christ to us - the Christological use of Scripture

Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is the content and theme of the Scriptures. It is all about him. So when we read the Bible we should be expecting to meet him in its pages. Of course it tells us how to live our life, it tells us about the religious customs of the Ancient Near East, it gives us words to express some of our deepest emotions, and all-sorts. But that is all with one aim - to drive us to Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection for us.

When I read my daily Bible reading I want to look to Christ. I don't want to look at the knowledge that I gain in by studying it. I also don't want to look at myself piously using my time to read it.

I love Dave Bish's little video of Mike Reeves on this.

I want to to be transfixed by Jesus this year through reading my Bible. To know Christ, and his work, better.

2. To be proclaimed - the Centrifugal use of Scripture

Luther apparently said that "The church is not a pen-house but a mouth-house". By which he meant that the church is not meant to be studying Scripture but proclaiming it. So we are not Gnostics, reading the Bible to gain secret knowledge for ourselves. We are to declare its content (Christ) to our brothers and sisters in the church, and to those we know who are not yet Christians. When we read Scripture we should be thinking: "What does this have to say to Jack struggling with motivation in his job?" "What relevance does Christ declared here have to Jill who finds a God who sends people to hell intolerable?" "What does the passage I have read have to say to the culture I live in?" We should then take what we have heard in the Scripture and share it with people. Like the Jews, we have been "entrusted with the oracles of God" (Rom 3:2), but entrusted with them in order to declare them to the world. We receive Christ through the Scriptures, but that is a gift for us to pass on.

I want to see my friends and family change by my reading of the Bible this year. To see some turn to Jesus, and others be built up by the truth of the Gospel.

3. To be applied - the Centripetal use of Scripture

Last year I often thought about Bonhoeffer's observation that American Christianity was "Protestantism without Reformation". In context he meant that American Christians hadn't understood that "God's 'criticism' touches even religion". So it is not "us and them" (i.e. the Church and the World) because we too are still sinners. The Church is still sinful, and we need the Gospel as much as the world. As Solzhenitsyn famously said "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart". The condemnation of the "law" and the encouragement of the Gospel is for us.

The "them" who we imagine "need to hear this" is not just our contemporaries either. Practically, I often sense that we are particularly poor at applying the Scripture to ourselves when reading the OT. We often read the OT condemnations against the faithlessness of Israel, as against either non-Christians, or worse as merely historical fact. Instead we should read the OT like the Apostles who saw Israel as the Church - which means both the condemnations and the promises that they heard belong to us too.

So we should always be asking questions like: "what does this say to our church?" "where am I in this parable?" "what is the appropriate response for me to make to this passage?"

I want to be changed by my reading of the Bible this year. To put to death sin, and rejoice in what I have been given.

The first use is the primary one, and in a way contains the other two. But if we don't use the Bible Centrifugally we become hermits and if we don't use it Centripetally we become self-righteous. I fear I often don't use it in any of the three ways, but I pray 2010 will be different.

[Inspired/plagiarised from Leo Sanchez's lecture 'Uses of Scripture' in the Lutheranmind series]