A New Way of Reading/Seeing the Bible

Before getting into the content of the Bible itself, a short blog entry on a new way of reading/seeing the Bible (most of this blog entry are taken from Marcus Borg's book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time).

There are two sides of the debate of how to read/see the Bible, specifically with regards to the Bible's origin, authority and interpretation:

1. Fundamentalist and many conservative evangelical Christians - see the Bible's origin as coming from God and as a divine product. It is God's truth...and as a result, it is authoritative. They read the Bible literally - often referred to as "conscious literalists" (i.e. aware of problems posed by a literal reading but insist upon it nevertheless).
2. Moderate-to-liberal Christians - see the Bible as a human product - a human response to God. As such, it does not express the authoritative will of God - so we need to decide on the relevance of the "wisdom" for our time. They are strongly convinced that many parts of the Bible cannot be taken literally. They also see the Bible as "sacred" for Christians in that it is a foundational document for our religion with which we should be in continuing dialogue.

This second group typically take a "historical-metaphorical" approach to reading the Bible. By historical, the question is "What did this text mean in the ancient historical setting in which it was written?". By metaphorical, the question is "What does this story mean as a story, independent of its historical factuality?" With this view, the Bible is seen as a combination of history and metaphor. That is, some events in the Bible really happened. At the same time, there are "metaphorical narratives" in which an event that happened (or may have happened) is given a metaphorical meaning; or events are not based on a particular historical event, but which instead are purely metaphorical or symbolic.

To take this approach to reading the Bible, you need to move from precritical naivete to postcritical naivete. Precritical naivete is an early childhood state in which we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us to be true is indeed true. In this state, Christians simply hear the stories of the Bible as true stories. Postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the biblical stories as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true - that is, you can accept that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.

The remaining blog entries in this Bible Exploration series attempt to adopt a postcritical naivete viewpoint and a historical-metaphorical approach to reading the Bible and understanding its meaning for Christians.