We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Thinking Biblically?

Bible

Olga Caprotti via Compfight

Micah J. Murray over at Redemption Pictures posted this reflection called Beware of Thinking Biblically. The image of a google search on the topic is worth the price of admission. Christians throw around this phrase in some really damaging ways, as Rachel Held Evans demonstrated in her recent publication of A Year of Biblical Womanhood. What do we mean by “thinking Biblically” and how can we avoid using this phrase to marshall support for our various sacred cows? Keeping Jesus at the center and maintaining a healthy amount of humility and openness would go a long way.

From Micah’s reflection:

So do we give up on “thinking Biblically” altogether? Certainly not. But we must approach our own conversations with the constant awareness that we might be wrong. That we don’t have all the answers. That someday, five hundred or a hundred or thirty years from now our brothers and sisters may look back and wonder how we could have missed the point. We must be open minded, willing to read its pages over and over again and change our minds as our hearts are opened to the truth.

And always, always, we must cling to Jesus.

 

Related Reading

Cruciform Aikido Pt 2: God-Forsaken Judgment

So if Jesus is the supreme revelation of what God is like, as we explained in our last post, what does that tell us about the nature of God’s judgment?

As Jesus was dying on the cross he cried out, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?,” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46). This shocking cry reveals…

God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense

As the title suggests, in his book, God’s Problem: How The Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer, Bart Ehrman argues that the Bible has nothing compelling to say about the problem of evil. Well, I just put down a beautifully written four-hundred and fifty page book that compellingly argues…

The Greatest in the Kingdom (2 of 2)

Article by Natalie Frisk This post is a summary of what was discussed at the ReKnew CrossVision Conference in regard to what and how we teach our kids about the cruciform hermeneutic. Taking Jesus into the Old Testament I co-lead a family-friendly home church where we sometimes get into spiritually deep conversations with children. There…

The Rule of Love

The traditional confession that Scriptura sacra sui ipsius interpres (“Sacred Scripture is its own interpreter”) presupposes that there is one divine mind behind Scripture, for example. Moreover, Church scholars have traditionally assumed that Scripture’s unity can be discerned in a variety of concepts, motifs, themes and theologies that weave Scripture together. And to speak specifically of the…

The Bible is Infallible NOT Inerrant

While the cruciform understanding (explained here) of the “God-breathed” nature of Scripture is in tension with the way most talk about inerrancy (See previous post on inerrancy), I do not believe it is at all incompatible with what the Church has always sought to express by affirming the “infallibility” the Scripture. The core conviction is that Scripture will…

Getting Honest about the Dark Side of the Bible

 Eddy Van 3000 via Compfight While most of the Bible exhibits a “God-breathed” quality, reflecting a magnificently beautiful God that is consistent with God’s definitive revelation on the cross, we must honestly acknowledge that some depictions of God in Scripture are simply horrific. They are included in what is sometimes called “the dark side of…