What do you believe about the Bible, and why?

In our discussion group on Jan. 4th , we tackled the question, “What do you believe about the Bible, and why?”

I asked the group to give, not the textbook answer, but their own personal answers, including any struggles they might have with scripture, citing any source they'd like.

During the course of our discussion, we discovered that this is a supremely important question which affects many other questions we might have concerning spirituality and scripture.

Interestingly enough, none of us really struggled with the transmission or translation of the scriptures from ancient times to modern times. Rather, our struggle was with the actual inspiration of the original texts themselves – more specifically, Paul’s epistles. There was some confusion between the inspiration of the writings themselves and our present-day interpretation of those writings, some of which was left unresolved for a later date.

Some of us concluded that we were big fans of Jesus and His anti-establishment shirking of the legalism of the Pharisees, while at the same time, not being too keen on the way Paul seems to institute still more “rules” on Christian living. There was also some unresolved confusion about the historical context of some scriptures and how that affects our interpretation and implication of those scriptures.

Though somewhat unresolved, we decided to let the question rest for now.

Here was an interesting link I found relating to our discussion about Biblical interpretation: http://www.gotquestions.org/interpretations-Christian.html


Our next group meeting will be on Saturday, Jan. 19 at 7 pm. Our question/topic is: What is the church? What does it look like? What is its purpose?