Learning about the Bible as an adult has been an eye-opening experience. I've read about the challenges early translators had to accurately interpret poetic language in some of the books. I’ve learned about the difficulties of transferring idioms from ancient times to relevant and contemporary ideas. I’ve learned about new ways to view the stories of the Bible, as metaphors to offer insight about inner life, relationship conflicts and resolutions, the courage and strength of ordinary people to face trials just like we do today and so much more. Freed from the weight of all-or-nothing thinking I’ve enjoyed reading both old and new Bible scholars who are uninhibited by the need to take the Bible as the word of God.
American philosopher, Ernest Holmes, wrote “Strange as it may appear, the Bible contains a key to health, happiness and success. It tells how to obtain and what to avoid. When understood, the Bible is a text book for life. But the Bible presents its truths in a mystical manner; its meaning is hidden behind story and fable, work pictures, and figures of speech. We must seek its hidden meaning and reveal the purpose underlying its teaching.”
I think the key contained in the Bible remained hidden from me for so long because I didn’t get the big picture as a child; I didn’t understand the context. I didn’t realize that the world view of the ancient people who authored and heard the stories of the Bible was limited to their understanding of the physical world as they knew it. Bishop Spong’s book Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism introduced me to details that seem obvious to me now but which I hadn’t considered: the authors of Genesis thought that the earth was flat, surrounded by water on all sides and that the sky was a dome over the earth into which the sun had been placed to bright up the day and that God was thought to live just beyond the sky, like an earthly king, causing everything to be. I remember the relief of thinking, the people who wrote these Bible stories may have made a few other errors too.
Bishop Spong wrote “The Bible relates to us the way our ancient forebears understood and interpreted their world, made sense out of life, and thought about God. Our task is the same as theirs. We must interpret our world in the light of our knowledge and suppositions. We must, as they sought to do , make sense out of life in terms of our understanding of meaning and values. We must think about God in the light of our perceptions of divinity. The Bible becomes not a literal road map to reality but a historic narrative of the journey our religious forebears made in the eternal human quest to understand life, the world, themselves and God.”
This has been wonderful, freeing me up to read the stories of the Bible as I would and revered stories with an openness to learn their life-lessons and the liberty to abandon what
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