{"id":16517,"date":"2013-08-08T17:12:27","date_gmt":"2013-08-08T21:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=16517"},"modified":"2013-08-08T17:12:27","modified_gmt":"2013-08-08T21:12:27","slug":"reading-the-bible-without-understanding-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2013\/08\/reading-the-bible-without-understanding-it.html","title":{"rendered":"Reading the Bible Without Understanding It"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Via Fred Clark<\/a>, I learned of the wonderful blog Defeating the Dragons<\/a>, offering one person\u2019s experience of leaving fundamentalism behind. Here is an excerpt from a recent post<\/a> there:<\/p>\n

It never fails to utterly astonish me\u00a0<\/em>that, even with all of my familiarity, even with all the Sword Drills and the Memorization Contests and AWANA and the constant stream of \u201cthe Bible says\u2026\u201d that I really\u00a0had no idea what it actually says<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019ve read it as least half a dozen times.<\/p>\n

\"\"How did this\u00a0happen<\/em>? How did I grow up going to church four times a week, grow up reading my Bible, go to a Bible college, take eight separate Bible courses, and come out on the other side so completely clueless?<\/p>\n

And what I\u2019ve been realizing, slowly, is that I never really read the\u00a0Bible<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Bible was just another tool, just another opportunity for fundamentalism to become an ingrained part of who I was. On top of the words I read in the Bible was layer upon layer of interpretation, of meaning, of what I was taught was the \u201ccorrect\u201d way to read it. I read those words with the black and white lens of literalism.<\/p>\n

And when I read my Bible, the words that could have revealed a God of love, of justice, of mercy and compassion, were almost utterly obscured by a god of vengeance, wrath, judgment, jealousy, and righteousness. When I read my Bible, fundamentalism lay down on top of it and forced me to read through a glass darkly. The doctrines of fundamentalism cloaked and disguised things it didn\u2019t want me to see\u2013 like the fact that Paul calls Junia \u201coutstanding among the apostles.\u201d I\u00a0must\u00a0<\/em>have read those words. They\u2019re right there, smack dab at the end of Romans. But I never saw them, never understood them, never once thought about what they could mean. I never once realized that the last good king, Josiah, went to the\u00a0prophetess Huldah<\/em>. Not Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, or Nahum, or Habakkuk.\u00a0Huldah<\/em>\u2013 a woman. Entire stories were completely erased\u2013 obliterated by the battle cry of\u00a0sound doctrine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I was taught to \u201crightly divide the word of truth,\u201d but what I didn\u2019t realize was that they were limiting me.\u00a0Rightly dividing\u00a0<\/em>was, intrinsically,\u00a0interpret anything you find according to the doctrines you\u2019ve been given<\/em>. If anything in the Bible seemed to come into tension with those doctrines, it wasn\u2019t the\u00a0Bible<\/em>, no, it was just my interpretation of it, and I just needed to go back and\u00a0rightly<\/em>\u00a0divide it this time.<\/p>\n

All of this has left me with whispers and voices I can\u2019t ignore when I try to read it. There are whole passages\u2013entire books\u2013 that I have to avoid because I can\u2019t read them without hearing another person inside of my head telling me what to think, what to see, what to believe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about in my recent post about \u201cInterpreting Scripture in Light of Scripture.\u201d<\/a> Ultimately it privileges some parts of the Bible and silences others, leaving many who have \u201cread\u201d the Bible countless times still unable to hear parts of it, because of the lens, the approach to reading it, that they have been taught to use.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Fred Clark, I learned of the wonderful blog Defeating the Dragons, offering one person\u2019s experience of leaving fundamentalism behind. Here is an excerpt from a recent post there: It never fails to utterly astonish me\u00a0that, even with all of my familiarity, even with all the Sword Drills and the Memorization Contests and AWANA and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-fundamentalism-religion"],"yoast_head":"\nReading the Bible Without Understanding It<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Via Fred Clark, I learned of the wonderful blog Defeating the Dragons, offering one person's experience of leaving fundamentalism behind. 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