Welcome back to our blog series on discernment. We’ve had a break over the summer and are ready and raring to go. Everything we’ve written so far was done the old-fashioned way – we circulated documents and waited for each other to find time to write a response. For this part of the series we decided to do something different, and last week we recorded, transcribed, and edited a conversation between us. 

So what follows is some of our thoughts on using the Bible to help us make good and godly decisions. We are very pleased with the result and think that you will enjoy the more conversational tone.

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Christian believers talk a lot about using the Bible in the process of making decisions but, to put it bluntly and somewhat provocatively, can we really use documents written to address issues common to the Bronze Age or Classical Era in our own discernment process? What do we mean when we think about these texts as God’s word? And if we are to take the Bible seriously, which all of us most definitely believe we should, how do each of us read and use it in our day-to-day lives?

Those of you who have thought deeply about these questions will be very aware that there are at least a dozen great books on this subject. So we don’t stand a hope of covering every angle or question in what was a 90 minute conversation! We do hope, however, that you find the next part of our blog series useful, and please do get in touch if you would like to engage with us at any point: hello@northumbrian.org.

What role does the Bible play in our lives? 

Craig

The way I read and use the Bible has changed over the years. It most definitely began with a very deep fascination with Jesus back in my teenage years. And then as I went to various lectures in the years before theological college I became enthralled by the sense that there are many fascinating stories and personalities in scripture but they’re embedded into a much larger and evolving narrative. It’s a bit like one of those 8-part detective dramas where each hour-long episode resolves a particular crime, but there are also some more complex dramas that might take the whole series to resolve, or they run and run across multiple series. And there’s often a sense that it’s the larger stories that hold the whole thing together.

I also recall that as I became interested in history, the degree to which the grand themes in the Bible have influenced the last few thousand years of human history became another fascination. But over the last few years I’ve gone round the circle and arrived back at the beginning as I began to do a lot more research into the culture of the First century. I became fascinated with Jesus again, and that’s where I find myself now.

Simon

I’m a follower of Jesus and, like you, there isn’t really any other Jesus to me than the one revealed in the New Testament. And so if I’m not gonna follow that Jesus, then I’m just making it up on the fly. This is the story of Jesus that has been carried down to us for generation after generation, and this is the story that the family has preserved for us. There isn’t another one. Sure, there are stories about Jesus that weren’t included in the New Testament, but we can trace where they came from and there’s no sign that they came from anything closer to the source than what we have in the New Testament.

The theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote a little book called The Bible makes Sense, which I found incredibly helpful because it helped me understand that history is at the centre of what the Bible is about – there are these events that happened that created a huge splash that makes up the whole of the New Testament. There’s this one big rock that’s thrown in a lake and then everything else rippled out from it.

So for me, I start with the story of Jesus. For me, that’s what being a Christian is. You don’t bring your philosophy of religion. You don’t bring your pre-existing ideas of what God has to be, before you come to the story of Jesus. And Jesus says if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the father. So for me, the big splash at the centre of history is the revelation of Jesus – that God is not what we expect and is surprising, and then everything else in the New Testament is a ripple out from that. 

But Jesus spoke Hebrew in the sense that he spoke the Hebrew scriptures, so we also have to read the First Testament to understand the whole family story. So I’m an average reader of the scriptures, including the bits that I don’t like, and including the bits that I frankly think contradict Jesus’ big story about God.

It is also true that we can’t understand Jesus without understanding the world that he was in dialogue with. So for me, the Bible is still as central as it ever was. But rather than reading it flat, everything being equal, I’m definitely someone who starts with the story of Jesus and then sees how things kind of ripple out from that.

Julie

I’d agree with that. I’d agree with quite a lot of what you’ve said there, Simon. In my personal life I read the Bible to discover more about Jesus and come to the Bible with a posture of learning. There’s bits of the Bible I know really well and, when I’m out on a walk, bits of it will come into my head. And I can say certain bits off by heart. And there’s bits that I don’t know well at all. There’s still a lot I need to learn.

I use some apps to help me. I use Lectio 365 fairly regularly which helps me look at certain pieces in a new way. Sometimes I follow a theme which I find really helpful and I know that many in my church find that helpful as well. So recently the theme of Empire has been really helpful as I seek to understand Jesus’s context better. It helps me to discern how to understand things that are happening in the world and see how those power structures of empire still are at play today.

And as a Minister, I am also using the Bible in my working life, if you can call it that. I lead worship using the Bible. I preach from the Bible, but I know we’ll be getting into the way communities discern together later.

Dave

It’s actually quite difficult to talk about what role the Bible plays in our lives from an individual perspective without actually straying into some of the other themes we’re going to explore in later blogs.

Let’s take the example of Jesus on the Emmaus Rd. OK, he’s met these two disciples and what does he do? He goes through the whole of the Scriptures and he says, “Hey, that points to me, and that points to what has just happened in Jerusalem.”

So thinking about discernment, if we’re trying to find out what God thinks, and we accept that in some way the scripture gives us an insight into God’s character, God’s thoughts and the way God acts, then if we don’t read it we’re shutting off one of the principal ways that God has chosen to interact and make himself known.

Because the scriptures point to Jesus and Jesus points us to God. So, I make a point of regularly reading scripture and praying with scripture. I read the bible in several different ways:

·     As a “novel”, so I get a better understanding of the flow of the whole story and how it relates to Jesus

·     As a “text book”, when I study a bit of the scriptures in depth, to try to understand what it would have meant to its original hearers and so that, as a person who teaches the Bible to others, I can help them to understand it.

·     As a “love letter”…despite being part of the human race that is far from what God intended it to be, I find that God loves me, along with all the rest of us, immensely and sent Jesus to restore a broken relationship.                                                  

The scriptures also remind me that, because of that relationship, Jesus still speaks today in all sorts of ways. And the scriptures help me to discern if what I am hearing is the sort of thing Jesus might say…”Does this sound like Jesus?”

Roy

I don’t think I’d be here today without the Bible. I think it’s the book that has shaped and transformed my life more than any other book. I remember, as a young man looking for adventure and searching for a sense of meaning, I found myself among a group of Christians who were working through John’s gospel and it was the “I ams” of Jesus that were a bridge over which I travelled and I met this amazing, amazing Christ who has changed my life.

And I think it was the Scripture Union commentary on John’s Gospel entitled something like Invitation to Live that I was given in my early days, together with the Catholic publication on the life of Jesus which looked at the scriptures that pointed to him. And that relationship with the Bible continues. 

My relationship to the Bible, my understanding of the Scriptures, has changed over the years. In our Northumbria Community we talk in our rule of life about being saturated in the scriptures. And so most days, actually I would say nearly every day, I am reading and encountering Scripture in some form and it continues to inform me. It continues to inspire me. It continues to exasperate me on occasions. It has its contradictions in there, but it’s still a great inspiration, informing, guiding, helping me to think and act. Hopefully it is continuing to shape my thinking, my attitudes and my behaviour as somebody who wants to follow Jesus. 

I think back to my early days of Bible College where people were doing scripture memorisation. We needed to learn proof Bible texts as we went out on missions. So you definitely needed John 3:16 but don’t bother with what went before and what came afterwards. Likewise John 3:16, Romans 3:23, Romans 6:23, Romans 5:1 etc.

And I remember my Bible college Principal saying it’s not a question of shooting people down with scripture and having some proof texts. We learn it so that, when people bump into us or cut us down, we ‘bleed biblically’. It means that our lives are so saturated in the scriptures that when people encounter us in everyday life, our attitudes, our speech, our actions, our behaviour, are shaped by Jesus.