Bible Exploration

Well, it has been a couple of weeks since I finished my fundamentals framework. Since that time, I've been thinking about what I should tackle next. I've wavered between a few options, but I think I'm going to try to address the Bible in more depth.

I touched on the Bible in my Bible Beliefs entry, and I noted the pivotal importance that your perspective on the Bible (i.e. as either a divine product [God's very words] or as a human product reflecting the experiences and responses of two communities to God and Jesus) has on your approach to Christianity and theology. I also noted the impact that a couple of books had on my understanding of the Bible: Misquoting Jesus (by Bart Ehrman) and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (by Marcus Borg). I am part way through two other books which continue to shed light on the Bible for me: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (by John Shelby Spong) and The Last Week (by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan). Before I finish this series of blog entries, I anticipate delving into History of the End of the World (by Jonathan Kirsch).

So I'm going to try to provide a synopsis of what I've learned in these books. Here is my outline for this endeavour:

• How the Bible became a book
• A new way of reading/seeing the Bible
• Revisiting the Creation stories
• Plowing through the Pentateuch
• New perspectives on the Prophets
• Gaining wisdom from the Wisdom books
• The evolving stories of the Gospels
• A primer on Paul's writings
• Revelations from Revelation

I must admit that this is a daunting exercise for me. I know for certain that it will take me a long time to complete this effort, and, as I start, I'm not even sure I will be able to finish. But as I felt when I started my fundamentals framework, I feel like this is the right topic to dive into next so that I can adequately explain and support my current Christian thinking.

Before I start, let me clarify that I anticipate taking very little credit for the thinking that will lie beneath the blog entries in this series - I am not a Biblical scholar by trade. I fully anticipate leaning heavily on the books I mentioned earlier, and I will attempt to give credit where I can.

I hope this series will be useful to all who encounter it. I will repeat the same three goals (1) I noted when I began my fundamentals framework, since they are equally relevant for this Bible Exploration series:

• That the blog entries will be "interesting and refreshing" to Christians and non-Christians and will help both to "grapple with points of view they might otherwise have dismissed without serious thought";
• That the blog entries' content might help "shift logjammed debates into more fruitful possibilities"; and,
• Somewhat selfishly, that the process of writing the blog entries will help me to "grow in [my] understanding of the subject matter, and enable others to do so as well".

Here we go again...

Notes:
(1) Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).