Reading the Bible with Its Writers

The Bible is a collection of sixty-six books, written by many different people over many thousands of years. All of its writers lived in an ancient-world context and thought in ancient-world ways. But as Bible readers today, we live and think in the modern world—which is increasingly a postmodern world. Things that were "obvious" to them are not "obvious" to us, and vice versa. For Christians who want to be faithful to the Bible as the Word of God, the time and distance between then and now is a real challenge to navigate. Stephen Burnhope suggests that we won’t get it right by collapsing that gap—by just picking the text up and reading it. "The Bible says . . . [insert a verse]" is not enough. We will mishear both what the human authors were saying and what the divine author was saying. Reading the Bible well starts from reading it with its writers—understanding it as they understood it: what they were saying; why they said it; and how they said it. All of which is shaped and framed by the Bible’s "big themes" that, once we’re aware of them, we see running throughout, from cover-to-cover.