Big Questions: Concluding Thoughts

Over the last few weeks we’ve thought through some of the Big Questions to ask ourselves when we read the Bible in order to help us leave the Scriptures with as good of an interpretation and application as possible, one that is not just faithful to the text, but helps us to be more faithful too.

The questions followed the five steps of my Integral Hermeneutic method:

Experience

This step is all about bringing our full self to the text and ensuring we’re actually engaging with it, not keeping it at arm’s length. Starting with this is a bit of a twist from most Bible study methodologies, since it allows the subjective part of our reading to take the lead. The goal of the method is not to ‘crack the code’ and find the correct interpretation, but a faithful interpretation that is both informed and personal. The questions here are:

• What am I feeling?
• What am I being called to do?

Encounter

In this step we look at who it is we meet in the text. This will change from text to text; some will have characters, some will have authors and recipients, some will have narrators and audience. The goal here is give all of the relevant parties some focus so that we don’t miss any perspectives on the story. There’s just one question here:

• Who am I meeting?

Explore

This step takes the ideas, questions, and hypotheses that came up for us in the first two steps and explores them further by learning as much as we can. For those of us who have access, this may involve looking through scholarly materials and, but for most of us a good commentary or two, or even just a reference Bible may be enough to get us thinking in the right direct. In my experience, even if I don’t have the time to do a deep exploration of the questions, the very act of asking them is helpful. The main questions here are things like:

• What is the historical and cultural context?
• What is the literary context?
• What else do the Scriptures say about this?
• What do traditional readings of the text have to say about it? (and about the tradition?)

Challenge

The next step looks at the text through a critical lens, recognizing that the Scriptures are written from certain perspectives from particular times and places, and also that we as readers approach the text from our own perspective and time and place. The main questions we ask here are:

• Whose text is it?
• How is my context impacting my reading?

Expand

The final step is to make sure our Scripture reading leaves us changed, and changed for the better. It frames this transformation in three ways:

• How does my interpretation encourage growth?
• How does my interpretation encourage me to love? (Or, How does it expand my circle of empathy?)
• What is the impact of my reading on others? (Or, what fruit does it bear in the world?)

There is nothing magical or special about these questions. There are many others that can help us along the way, and some of these may not always be fruitful in every case. But questions like these help us to read the Bible better by keeping us out of our silos, pet interpretations, and tendency to proof-texting and finger-pointing. They insist that we don’t treat the Bible as something we use to win arguments or to shut down conversation, but rather as a tool for our own spirituality, a place of transforming encounter with God. And it does it in a way that is also appropriately culturally and historically informed.