Reading the Bible with Fresh Eyes in 2022 (Part 1)
New Year, New Bible Goals
The new year presents us with the opportunity to set new goals and for many Christians that includes committing to regularly reading the Bible. I share a similar desire with my Christian siblings to engage the Bible deeply in 2022 because the Ghanaian Pentecostal Christian communities and American conservative evangelical preachers that formed my faith taught me to have deep respect for scripture and its important place in Christian discipleship and faith formation.
I can’t imagine my faith without a relationship to the Bible and couldn’t discard the Bible even as my theological and political convictions began to change. I have however, had to do the long and hard work of unpacking what the Bible is, its purpose(s), how the Bible works, how to read it along with its place in the Christian walk and life of the Church etc. and the best terms to engage it on.
I write with a sense of urgency. Our communal interpretations of the Bible have life and death consequences for image bearers and communities within and outside the church. I want you to be open to rethinking your assumptions about what the Bible is and how it works after reading my article series and engaging the resources I share. In this article I will describe the frameworks I was given to relate to the Bible, the people who initially shaped my thinking of what a faithful Christian view of gender and sexuality is and how my mind changed. Perhaps you will identify with some of the paradigms and people I identify.
Messages I received about the Bible Growing Up
- The Bible is the word of God; it essentially came down from heaven and the human writers are incidental
- The Bible is authoritative in the life of believers
- The Bible is relevant for today. The Bible is our primary source as Christians when thinking through contemporary conversations about identity, gender, marriage, womanhood, manhood, sexuality, racial justice etc.
- The Bible speaks clearly and cohesively on the above topics
5. The Bible is relatively easy to understand and interpret
6. I should read the Bible as if I am the audience
7. I should conform my desires, beliefs to the word of God. It should not be the other way around
The above cultivated a number of assumptions and presuppositions about what the Bible is and how it works.
Similarly, like all Christians I want to be faithful to God and counter cultural if necessary. John Piper, Matt Chandler and Paul Washer seemed to articulate a vision of gender and sexuality that resonated with how I assumed the Bible worked and seemed to line up with what the Bible said about gender, gender roles and sexuality. To illustrate, my peers read the following ,
Genesis 2: 20–24
The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam[g] there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made[h] into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”[i]
24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
as a description of the first marriage. This passage shows us that marriage is an institution established by God not humankind. God designed marriage as an institution where a man and a women come together in one flesh intimacy
Or when reading Ephesians 5: 22–33
“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing[b] her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”
After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church — 30 for we are members of his body. 31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”[c] 32 This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
They’d say the meaning of Ephesians 5: 22–33 for Christians is straightforward: within the context of Christian marriage God is calling married Christian women to submit to their husbands and calling Christian husbands to loving sacrificial leadership. God intends Christian marriage to mirror the relationship between Jesus and the Church which is rooted in God’s creation order hence the quotation of Genesis 2. This was God’s design for marriage and if it is truly lived up to, it is good for the church and society.
Why I Reassessed My Assumptions about How the Bible Works
I began forming friendships with Christians who affirmed Christian women being pastors and elders in the local church, affirmed Queer Christians being married in the context of the Church and supported Transgender Christians getting gender affirming surgery if that’s what they needed. Simply put, I was confronted with a community of Christians who were just as devout as my community and I, regarded the Bible as authoritative but had come to different conclusions on gender, gender roles and sexuality, which I thought Scripture was very very clear about.
I was taught to be skeptical of the legitimacy of their faith in light of their conclusions. I believed they were sadly mistaken and held to unBiblical beliefs. How could one respect the word of God, take scripture and its implications for our lives seriously and affirm all the aforementioned? I believed scripture was clear that males and females were equal in value and worth (as affirmed in Genesis 1:27). However, in the context of the local church (and family), scripture clearly taught that Christian husbands were called to loving and sacrificial servant leadership in the home. Qualified godly men were to be considered for leadership in the local church and Christian wives to submission. I also believed scripture clearly taught that God created humans male and female and marriage was between 1 man and 1 woman, and that was the only God honouring context for sexual intimacy.
Nevertheless, my friends did not fit the usual stereotypes I had about Christians who didnt agree with the above. They loved Jesus deeply, took up their crosses to follow Jesus as stressed in Matthew 16, were very thoughtful and rigorous in their study of the Bible , and saw the Bible as authoritative and an essential part of their discipleship. I couldn’t simply dismiss them as twisting the Bible to fit their own desires or capitulating to secular progressive sentiments as I’d done in other instances with other Christians.
I realized there was no point in discussing gender, gender roles, sexuality, and romantic and sexual ethics without first unpacking what the Bible is, its purpose, how to read it and its place in the Christian walk and life of the Church etc. Thus, I became determined to learn what the Bible was apart from my initial assumptions. My inquiry included the following questions:
What is the Bible’s purpose? What is the best way to read the Bible? How does the Bible work? What does it mean for the Bible to be the word of God? Authoritative? Inspired? My questions brought me into conversation with a community of Christians that were ethnically and nationally diverse, belong to different socio-economic backgrounds, have different gender identities, romantic and sexual orientations and belong to different Christian traditions.
Likewise, I tried to engage with the scholarship of Christians who have identities that are marginalized within church and society because Biblical interpretation isn’t merely a mental exercise but a matter of life and death for us. Biblical interpretations that affirm women as potential shepherds of the people of God versus Biblical interpretations that do not, determines whether many of us can realize God’s call to pastoral leadership on our lives. Biblical interpretations that affirms gender and sexual diversity as celebrated and delighted by God versus Biblical interpretations that do not, is the difference between social exile, cultural and ecclecial (church) dispossession for many of us.
In conclusion, the Bible remains authoritative and an essential part of my faith formation. Nevertheless, I dont have the same assumptions of what the Bible is and how it works after engaging with the field of Biblical studies and other theological disciplines. I will follow this article with a terms of reference where I answer the questions I posed in this article.
Thank you for reading.
Until the ink drips,
Akua B
