Back to the issue of Consistency

So we have seen that the Bible is a mixture of many kinds of literary type or genre, and that there are many questions we need to ask of the text and its background to get some idea of the message underlying what we are reading.

A literal understanding of the text is often going to be of little help navigating its meaning for us today. Unfortunately there are far too many people around who think that this is the only way to understand and interpret the Bible. This approach whilst being done under the banner of "belief in the Bible as God's inspired Word" if anything does this Word a disservice by refusing to grapple with it as it rightly demands. Belief in the Bible as the Inspired Word of God does not mean that you have to take it literally. However those who not take the Bible literally are accused by their critics of undermining the truth and integrity of the Word by explaining its challenges and demands away. A literal approach to reading the Bible does give you a kind of consistency.  Its a consistency of approach. But it does not yield are consistent results. What we discover through a literal understanding of Scripture is God who judges and punishes, who is a loving and gracious God but who forgives only the penitent, who justifies those who believe in him and rejects those who do not, yet who also seems to reward people according to how they have behaved in this life, who answers the prayers of the righteous but not the unrighteous, and whose control over events seems to extend to the micro almost quantum level. This can lead to complicated and sometimes ridiculous explanations when we try to form a theology of God and try to understand conflicting passages and argue that really they don't conflict at all.

So is there another way?

I like to think that there is.

What if we use a different kind of way of assessing and understanding the text? What if we use the very character of God as our guide? God is love, therefore the text needs to be able to fit with this or be understood as being written in the developing phase of this understanding of God. If a passage does not fit with this idea of God we can read it as theology being formed rather than fully formed theology. We can understand it within the framework of the time and the culture within which it was written. We can see it as a product of its time, while also searching for deeper principles which may link to the idea of God as love. In future blogs I hope to be able to take a look at some texts from this point of view.

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