The Importance of Reading the Bible Well

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 11:55 am by Taylor S. Brown

The Importance of Reading the Bible Well 2017-02-24T11:55:35-06:00 Taylor S. Brown

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Interpreting Scripture well requires training, time, and guidance. If we are going to read the Bible in such a way that we seek not only to interpret the authorial intent of its human writers well, but also the intent of the Spirit Who guided them, then we have to bring all of our rational and spiritual faculties to bear. As Ben F. Meyer puts it, this sort of critical realist approach to interpretation requires us to read well:

“At the heart of critical realism is the theorem that the way to objectivity is through the subject, operating well…meaning is mediated, communicated, recovered, only if the reader reads well, only if he or she attends to an exact decoding of signs, to the particularities of the word-sequence that emerges, to how every element in it works with every other… Objectivity is not achieved by the flight from subjectivity nor by any and every cultivation of subjectivity, but by an intense and persevering effort to exercise subjectivity attentively, intelligently, reasonably, and responsibly.

-Ben F. Meyer, Reality and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship: A Primer in Critical Realist Hermeneutics (Michael Glazier, 1994), 3-4

I was reminded of this need to interpret the Bible well while reading through a part of Richard Hays’ classical study on the Apostle Paul’s use of the Old Testament in his writings, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (Yale University Press, 1989). Hays carefully shows throughout the book how Paul uses key literary echoes and allusions to the Old Testament throughout his theological thought and argumentation. In particular, Hays demonstrates how a careful and intertextual exegesis of Rom. 9:14-29 — the famous parable of the potter and the clay that seems to point toward an arbitrary divine sovereignty — points toward the opposite of how this text is often read by many evangelicals, especially those like John Piper and The Gospel Coalition.

“The parable [of the potter and the clay] suggests that the potter’s power is not destructive but creative: the vessel may fall, but the potter reshapes it. The parable, spoken in prophetic judgment upon Israel, is simultaneously a summons to repentance and a reassurance of the benevolent sovereignty of God, persistently enacted in his love for his people Israel even in and through the pronouncement of judgement. Thus, the allusion to Jeremiah 18 in Rom. 9:20-21, like other allusions and echoes earlier in the text, anticipates the resolution of Paul’s argument in Romans 11. The reader who recognizes the allusion will not slip into the error of reading Rom. 9:14-29 as an excursus on the doctrine of the predestination of individuals to salvation or damnation, because the prophetic subtexts keep the concern with which the chapter began — the fate of Israel — sharply in focus.”

-Hays, Echoes of Scripture, 66

Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul

When we read the Bible well — “attentively, intelligently, reasonably, and responsibly” as Meyer says — including the deep Old Testament echoes present in Paul and the rest of the New Testament, we can see the big differences that happen in our conception of the Christian God. In this case (and in many others) when we read and interpret the Bible well, including its intertextual echoes and allusions, we see that God’s sovereignty is not arbitrary and destructive, but benevolent and creative. Reading the Bible well makes a big difference.

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