An Invitation to Scripture 1

I want to invite you to read through the Bible with me. 

This week, as you read this first chapter, you might read through the Gospel of Mark. Read two chapters during each weekday, then read three chapters each day of the weekend.

1. The Bible is a many-splendored thing. It has many layers. My parents and grandparents read the Bible countless times into their eighties and nineties, and they made new discoveries every time. I am going to argue that one reason for this dynamic is the fact that words are so flexible, and God uses that flexibility to keep the words of the Bible a living word.

However, as we will see, the books of the Bible did have first meanings. These meanings were meanings that had to do with the people to whom God first spoke them. They had a "context," and context sets the rules for what words mean to someone hearing or reading them. You will see what I mean soon enough.

For now, I want to start with a first reading of the Bible. I want you to get in a helicopter with me and fly over the whole territory of Scripture to start. Mind you, we are getting in a Christian helicopter. Anyone with a family that tells stories will know that the same events can be told from more than one point of view. Do you have an uncle who tells the family story differently than your mother does? Or perhaps your father tells it differently than your grandmother.

Similarly, a Christian would tell the story of the Bible differently than an atheist. A Jewish person who does not believe Jesus is the Messiah would tell the story differently than a Roman Catholic. Frankly, there are thousands of different Christian groups who would tell the overarching story of the Bible a little differently from each other.

So our first fly over Scripture will just be one reading, a fairly historic reading. "Orthodoxy" means "right belief," and right belief with regard to Christianity is usually considered a basic understanding that developed in the first few centuries after Jesus. Christians arrived at a sort of agreement or consensus on the overall story. There is a sort of agreed storyline that focuses on one event in one book and then another event in another book. It then puts these events in different books into a plotline, the story of how God is saving the world.

You will not really find that whole story in any one place in the Bible. It is an overarching version of the story--or "metanarrative"--put together by Christian readers looking on the whole Bible from the outside looking in. This dynamic will be one of our earliest take-aways from our reading. We glue the pieces of the Bible together in our interpretations, typically without even knowing it. Without some reflection, we often have difficulty telling the difference between what part of our reading is the Bible and what part of our reading is the glue we bring to the text.

For this reason, our first fly over Scripture will have a lot of Christian glue in it...