I believe the Bible is the inspired word of God and therefore speaks with authority regarding our life and faith as followers of Jesus. That is why I want to encourage the reading of the Bible. Yet, I also believe we must learn to read the Bible well. Contrary to what some Christians might think, reading the Bible is more complicated than simply saying, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.”
The Bible actually says a lot of different things throughout the sixty-six writings we call the Old and New Testaments. These writings consist of different genres that span different contexts and historical periods as well as different covenants. Also, though the writings of the Bible were written for us, they were not written to us but were written to people living in contextual circumstances different from our own. Please don’t misunderstand me though. Most of the Bible is understandable with just a plain reading but simply pointing to a verse to make any kind of claim without any interpretive or theological considerations is rather banal, ignorant, and even dangerous too. Ergo my frustration with both the fundamentalist insisting that the creation narrative of Genesis unequivocally supports young-earth creationism and the secularist insisting the violence in the conquest narrative of Joshua makes God evil.
This is why, in addition to reading my book, I also highly recommend reading Dan Kimball’s book How (Not) to Read the Bible.1 Kimball lists “four facts” for reading the Bible:
The Bible is a library, not a book.
The Bible is written for us, but not to us.
Never read a Bible verse.
All of the Bible points to Jesus.
These are all important because though Bible is a collection of sixty-six different writings, they together tell a story that is Christ-centered and Kingdom-oriented. This is part of the point I am getting at in the fifth chapter of my book, titled The Living Bible: A Library with One Story to Tell. Once we understand that the Bible is telling a story, offering us a narrative of how God is redemptively at work in Christ to remake his creation into new creation,2 we are able to move beyond a concordance approach to reading the Bible that fails to understand various texts within the larger story.
Why does the biblical narrative matter? Because as followers of Jesus, we are part of the story the Bible is telling. That is, we are participants in this story and if we are to help convey the story well then we need to know the story.
This is also important because it gets to the purpose of scripture in the first place. The apostle Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “Every scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for showing mistakes, for correcting, and for training character, so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good.”3 The purpose of scripture is to teach us how to live this Christ-centered and Kingdom-oriented story well by doing what is good. As the church, we read the Bible so that we may understand what it means to follow Jesus Christ as people living under the kingdom-reign of God.
Doing good works that reflect the kingdom life Jesus teaches is why reading the Bible matters. But it matters even more because how we live always tells a story. So will we learn from the Bible and therefore tell the story of the Bible? I raise this question because the Bible that most people read every day is us as they observe the way we live. The question then is what story will they read, just another story ripped from the pages of our world, or will they read the good news of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God in the life we are living?
This is why our embodiment of the gospel matters and we can only do that well when we read the Bible well. That is why I wrote Gospel Portraits. If you already purchased a copy of my book and are reading it, thank you! If you haven’t, then what are you waiting for (wink, wink)?
Dan Kimball, How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-Women, Anti-Science, Pro-Violence, Pro-Slavery, and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture, Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2020.
At this point, let me also recommend John Mark Hicks, Around The Bible in 80 Days: The Story of God from Creation to New Creation, Abilene: Leafwood Press, 2022.
Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are taken from the Common English Bible, copyright 2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
In Ethiopia, "the bible" has over 80 books
Of course, and I'm well aware that for some Western Christians (typically Catholics) the Apocrypha is included in the biblical canon. I assume though that most readers only think of the sixty-six books that make up the Protestant canon as the Bible.