I wrote in my last post of our "Tough Religious Questions" chapel. Overall we had some good speakers address some challenging topics in a brief amount of time. But at base, I think it is important to ask, how do we determine how to apply the Bible to our lives? Now again, the assumption I am making here --at least for now--is that the Bible applies to our contemporary lives. There are a variety of other assumptions I am making as well: we reliably have the original text or the closest representation, the Bible comes from God through human authors, there are normative components to scripture that are valid across time, and some other assumptions we can address elsewhere. These assumptions are very important in how I approach the text. I think in many respects everyone approaches the Bible from a variety of assumptions whether one is the strictest inerrantist (someone who believes the Bible is literally true word for word and contains no errors) to the atheist. It is probably useful to every so often examine these presuppositions to identify them but also to question why it is that one holds a particular set of assumption instead of others. Simply holding assumptions or presuppositions is not a problem, but if they are not investigated and examined every so often, we might be missing out on how we are being unknowingly influenced or how we are missing some truths that could be very important.
But all of this is sidetracking me from what I want to discuss--the question of applicability. I believe the Bible is applicable today, but I think one needs to be careful in how one applies it. First, I do not believe that everything in the Bible applies to everyone for all time. I think a perfect example of this is 2 Timothy 4. Paul (and here is another assumption--I believe Paul wrote 2 Timothy) writes many commands and requests specifically to Timothy that are not meant for everyone. So, for example, I don't think it is my duty as a 21st-century Christian to get Paul's cloak and bring it to him.
So, how does anyone determine what is applicable and what is not? The first part, I think, must be to take seriously that the documents of the Bible were written to specific audiences. We must understand these documents in their original contexts first, before we can try to apply them to us today. To focus only on today ignores how the Bible was written--none of it was written directly to anyone living today. Certainly, I believe it was written for us, but it wasn't written to us. So, original context is very important. What did it mean to them? Why was it being written? What problems was if addressing? How should we understand this text in light of the situation of the author and recipients?
I think many of the problems and errors we see about the Bible today among Christians are due to an ignorance (willful or otherwise) of the original context. Revelation is a perfect example. How different is someone's interpretation of Revelation if they first recognize that it was written to an audience in antiquity and not to an audience thousands of years in the future? The same is related to salvation. A variety of people will pull passages out of their contexts (Romans 10:9-10, for example), and claim that a particular passage includes everything one needs to know about salvation as if Romans was not written to people already Christian (so they didn't need to be told how to become Christian) and as if Romans 10 didn't come after several other passages in Romans that addressed other aspects of how the Romans put on Christ or were put in Christ. But by making the text about us first, we lose something vital to understanding it.
Applying the text must start then with serious work and effort to understand the text and not take the quick and easy route to short answers. If I really want to understand how to live a life pleasing to God, I need to take the tine to understand what was originally written before trying to understand what it means for me today. Sure, I can take shortcuts, but if I want a faith that is authentically mine, there are some corners that cannot be cut.
More next time.
