Misunderstood

I do not have a graduate degree in theology. I have not studied the Bible in its original Greek and Hebrew text. Sometimes I express what I have learned from a passage to someone who has done those things (like my husband) and they - in love - inform me that I am a bit misdirected in my interpretation. At first, that was fairly offensive. Embarrassing, too, maybe. . . But these days I have learned to welcome such responses (or at least try to), and to then passionately pursue truth where I might have been injecting personal explanation. I don't want to read the Bible and then create my own doctrine based on my limited understanding. I want to know the Bible as God intended - to read it and understand it as it was meant to be understood.

I can understand a lot of things in Scripture on my own. . . I don't want you to think that we are incapable of that unless we've been to seminary. However, there is a limit to how much I can get out of it totally on my own. Why? Well, because on my own I didn't know the climate of the culture in Corinth when Corinthians was written. But when someone who studied the social, political, and cultural atmosphere in Corinth when Corinthians was written explained those things to me - I was able to read and understand the letter in a deeper, more exciting way! I am so grateful that there are people who dedicate their lives to understanding the historical and cultural issues of the bible. I gain a lot from their studies. . .

So, while knowing the history behind some of the books of the Bible helps us to understand what the authors were trying to say - we have to be careful not to use the excuse of culture to explain the Bible away. I have heard people argue that because certain letters were written to specific people in a specific culture they are totally inconsequential to us. There is nothing that we can apply to ourselves today because we are in a totally different culture. I'm sorry - but that is wrong. God inspired the writers of the Bible to communicate timeless, eternal truths. They did write to specific people, in a specific time - but that only means that sometimes we need to dig deeper to grasp the eternal truths and not just the cultural implications.

For example, in one of his letters Paul talks about women dressing with modesty and then gives the example of not braiding hair. Braiding hair is not a sin, nor is it immodest in and of itself. It did, however, communicate something immodest in the culture at that time. So our application today would be to identify what physical expressions communicate similarly in our culture - and avoid them.

I don't know where this came from today. Before I sat down I was reading about something else entirely. . . but there you go. Apparently that is on my mind.