Q&R: How to manage my bias when reading Scripture – Brad Jersak

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QUESTION:

When reading the Bible, I notice the temptation for us to simply come with our own ideas and assumptions, and to impose them on the text. That seems to be a way of “proof-texting” my way through Scripture to make a particular point.

RESPONSE:

That’s an extremely important observation. YES, ONE temptation is to bring our ideas and assumptions to the text, thus proof-texting, as you’ve said. I would add that parallel and perhaps even greater temptation is to imagine that we DON’T bring our ideas and assumptions to the text, especially if our interpretations of the Bible can be traced back to modernist methods that mirrored the Enlightenment skeptics who tried to lock down the Bible reading into a literary science (‘hermeneutic’). 

So our best hope, in my opinion, is:

(1)  to make Jesus the centre of our hermeneutic — how does this text point to him and how do his life and teachings subordinate those texts to himself, since He is the Word of God), 

(2) to take Paul very seriously about the necessity of the Holy Spirit’s illumination (versus scientific rules of interpretation), recognizing that the Holy Spirit is primarily experienced together as a community (dispersed across centuries and geography) collaborates to understand the text, and,

(3) to take the example and instructions of the first Christians (apostolic fathers) very seriously when they (who were in closer historical proximity to Christ) model Bible interpretation for us.

BUT there’s also a great, positive safeguard that we can all notice in ourselves: watch for times when Scripture rubs up against your own temperament, and your personal and cultural biases, yet you willingly undergo that tension as an act of submission. One of the best examples is all the ways that I do NOT naturally want to live the Jesus Way laid out in the Sermon on the Mount, where my own instinct is to resist Jesus’ words, and so my interpretation involves an act of repentance. E.g., loving my enemies, hosting unlovely people (Matt. 5), or trusting God completely for my provision (Matt. 6). 

Thanks for taking the Scriptures so seriously, and may we all submit our interpretation of the Bible to the Word of God, Jesus Christ.