Too many agendas

Craig Williams considers Leslie Newbigin's "A Walk Through the Bible" and Bible reading among Christians today. Newbigin says that today most people have a Bible but, instead of reading it as a unified story, we "treat the Bible as an anthology of helpful thoughts to which we may occassionally turn, and from which we can obtain comfort, guidance, direction." Craig wonders about the implications of this approach to discipleship:

With so many people claiming an evangelical faith and a trust in God and Jesus, why is it that there is so little evidence of belief? One problem is we read the Bible for what we can get out of it, not what it says. This book is not authoritative in our lives, it is an addendum. In Lewis's book, Experiment in Criticism, this is precisely his point. We end up telling the book what it should say to us, rather than "standing under the text" and letting the text tell us what it is about. We have so many agendas when we come to the Scripture that we are often unable to attend to its message. We seek comfort or guidance or help or bolstering that we often fail to let the text address our lives as they are. Maybe the answer to our lives is to correct bad thinking about the Bible? or Jesus? or ourselves? But if we don't let the Bible speak clearly, by always "jumping the gun" with our own agendas, we will never know the agenda(s) of the Bible itself.

Amen.