Peter Gommes has many good things to say in his bestseller ‘The Good Book’, not least is what he says on p. 12 about how not and how to do Bible study.
“Bible studies tend to follow this route. The Bible is simply the entry into a discussion about more interesting things , usually about oneself. The text is a mere pretext to other matters and usually the routine works like this: A verse or passage is given out, and the group or class is asked ‘What does it mean to you?’ The answers come thick and fast, and we are off into the life stories or personal situations of the group and the session very quickly takes the form of Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve Step meetings or other exercises in healing and therapy. I do not wish to disparage the very good and necessary work these groups perform…I simply wish to say that this is not Bible study, and to call it such is to perpetuate a fiction.
“Bible study actually involves the study of the Bible. That involves a certain amount of work, a certain exchange of informed intelligence, a certain amount of discipline. Bible study is certainly not just the response of the uninformed reader to the uninterpreted text, but Bible study in most of the churches has become just that— the blind leading the blind, or as some caustic critics of liberal Protestantism would put it, the bland leading the bland. The notion that texts have meaning and integrity, intention, contexts, and subtexts, and that they are part of an enormous history of interpretation that has long involved some of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world, is a notion often lost on those for whom the text is just one more of the many means the church provides to massage the egos of its members.”—- p. 12.
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