Resource theme: The Bible

I was raised to read the Bible spiritually. Spiritual readings encouraged believers to find correspondence between the world of the Bible and their own personal piety or spiritual needs. But spiritual interpretation, while personally satisfying, was socially inadequate: we were not encouraged to find connections between the social and political hostility we faced as black…

When I was a student, I found myself in a Bible study group led by someone who was on the committee of my university Christian Union. The subject was the authority of scripture. The verse we had got to was 2 Timothy 3:16 (‘All scripture is Godbreathed’). The question was, ‘How would you use this…

If you don’t buy into fundamentalism, what’s so special about the Bible? After all it’s a diverse collection of ancient texts, many of which are incomprehensible, irrelevant, factually wrong or morally repugnant. So what does the Bible say which (a) is different, and (b) matters so much as to be the basis for a religious…

To assert that the Bible is an authoritative book is shorthand. The majority of Christians in practice would not want to attribute the same kind of authority to all parts of it. The most obvious distinction is between the Old and the New Testament. Indeed, within the different parts, few would want to assert that…

A bank robber shoots a bystander dead. A long-term carer suffocates their chronically ill partner. A driver skids and hits a pedestrian, killing them. Three separate actions resulting in each case in a death. Yet our response to each situation will probably be different. We need an understanding of context when we try to appreciate…

Choosing the point at which to cut the continuous cloth of history is always in part an arbitrary decision. To understand the New Testament it is necessary to look at the events that preceded it. The term ‘New Testament’ implies an ‘Old Testament’, yet despite the very obvious dependence on that corpus of literature, there…

Reading and writing are things we take for granted. In the ancient world they were skills practised by very few people, and almost entirely in the service of two institutions, the royal court and the temple. These institutions needed scribes to enable them to be administered. The court had to engage in international diplomacy, keep…

The Bible comes to us between two covers. It is all too easy to believe that this book, like almost any other book, was written that way, in a single thrust. It is puzzling, therefore, that Christians differ among themselves over the extent of their sacred book. In fact no book of anything like that…

How does it come about that we still possess the Old and New Testaments, when they were written and compiled so many centuries ago? In a world before printing, this was only because they were continuously copied and recopied by generations of scribes. In the case of the Old Testament, there were until modern times…

The Bible is the most frightening book I know. I don’t go there for comfort and reassurance – I open the covers with a sense of anticipation close to dread. What challenge will I find next? The scariest moments of all come when trying to work with a Bible passage to prepare a sermon –…