Reading the Bible for All the Wrong Reasons

"My point was not so much that her reading of the Bible was wrong but that it is nonsensical to talk about understanding any sort of communication without interpreting it."

-Russell Pregeant (Reading the Bible for All the Wrong Reasons)*


How true this statement really is!  All communication has to be interpreted.  Even text messages, Facebook messages and status updates, etc.  And the way that we interpret and/or perceive a given communication is not necessarily how it was intended to be understood, and yet that perception shapes our reality.  What then does that mean for misinterpreted and misunderstood communication?  In particular, the way the biblical text shapes the generally perceived Christian reality is intriguing as the idea of interpretation (or misinterpretation) enters the conversation.

We all have lenses by which we read Scripture; we all bring our biases and our baggage, our perceptions of reality and, essentially, we come to the biblical text with ideas of what we think it says and means, and what we really want it to say and mean.  We inevitably eisegete the text, reading our selves (ideologies, philosophies, theologies, experiences, etc.) into holy writ.  While it is almost impossible to approach the text in a robotic fashion, checking all of our baggage at the door, we must be willing to recognize that we, in fact, bring all of our selves into any encounter with a given communication (i.e. the Bible).

In short, we are all interpreters.  The Bible, or any other form of communication, cannot simply be read and followed at face value.  As Pregeant states above, to attempt to do so is nonsensical.



*Pregeant, Russell.  Reading the Bible for All the Wrong Reasons.  Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011.