So you have a bright young person in your family/church, who’s made a significant ‘commitment to Christ’ and wants some help understanding the Bible.

Here are three suggestions, in the order I’d give them to her/him. (Why this order? Because, as C S Lewis says somewhere, early in one’s Christian life one is helped more by a conservative, uncomplicated approach. Later on one can read the controversial stuff).

1. T. Norton Sterrett & Richard L. Schultz, How to Understand Your Bible, IVP, (1973; 3rd edition 2010).

The late T. Norton Sterrett worked for many years with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in India, and wrote the original version of this helpful manual for his student friends. Wheaton professor Richard Schultz has updated it in terms of some later biblical scholarship, and has added more recent reference tools.

It’s conservative, yes. The really tough questions about historical-critical analysis of the Biblical text are not addressed here. The authors mostly quote from the TNIV, as you would expect, though other translations (including the NRSV) are cited throughout. They give a rationale for their choice, with a discussion about the challenging issues of ‘formal equivalence’, ‘functional equivalence’ etc. Yes, the Bible Dictionaries they recommend are headed by the IVP/Eerdmans volumes. There’s a helpful discussion of the varying meanings of words (like ‘temptation’) in English translations, and the need to recognize that words have different meanings in different cultures (‘homely’ in England may mean ‘home-loving’; but in the U.S. the same word may be insulting, meaning something like ‘ugly’). The chapter on figures of speech is helpful: Catholics and Luther and Zwingli, for example, interpreted ‘This is my body’ differently. (I’m not sure whether our young friends need to know about ‘Litotes’ or ‘Pleonasm’ – but these figures of speech were probably listed in the good professor’s Wheaton lecture-notes for Bible 101 (!).

What about the violent God of the Old Testament? You get the drift of this book’s approach in statements like this: ‘God at times permitted things he did not sanction… He tolerated things he did not approve of’ (p. 171). Later you’ll encourage your student-friend to read Marcus Borg’s Heart of Christianity for another – more ‘progressive’ – slant on that one. And ‘digging deeper’ in a study of Psalm 51, we aren’t troubled by Augustine’s rationale for the doctrine of Original Sin with the psalmist’s ‘In sin my mother conceived me’…

But, yes, I’d start with something like this…

2. Doug Rowston, Jesus and Life: Word Pictures in John’s Gospel, Baptist Churches of South Australia, 2010.

Next I’d recommend something like this well-written, expository/devotional study of the eight ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus and twelve parables of eternal life in John’s Gospel – from the pen/keyboard of a veteran Australian pastor/school chaplain/teacher of New Testament literature and language.

‘The major theme of the [Synoptic] Gospels is the kingdom of God… and [in] John’s Gospel… eternal life’. John (and Rowston’s commentary) has a ‘high Christology’: ‘According to John’s Gospel, [Jesus] says “I am this and that”: he is the king of God’s kingdom who brings God’s kind of life’.

You didn’t know the ‘parables of eternal life’ in John? They are: The Night Breeze, The Bridegroom and the Best Man, The Ripe Fields, The Apprentice Son, The Slave and the Son, The Shepherd and the Stranger, The Traveller in the Dark, The Grain of Wheat, The Walker at Sunset, The Bathtub and the Basin, The Father’s House, and The Woman in Childbirth. OK, you’ve understood them as metaphors/similes, rather than as parables in the sense the Synoptics uses that term…

Each of the short chapters includes the key text, context, content – in both detailed and summarized format, questions for reflection, and encouragement to pray – including a short prayer…

Read one of the 28 chapters per day: you’ll be enriched! (Copies available from Doug Rowston: drowston[at]myacn.net.au).

3. Trent Butler’s ‘Six Ways to Study the Bible’ (Chalice Press, Missouri, 2010), is built around Textual Study (the use of various Study Bibles is recommended, and commentaries such as the Word Biblical Commentary, the Anchor Bible, and the New International Commentary – and looks at questions like why there are discrepancies between various Bible translations); Literary Study, as you would guess, looks at varying literary genres in the biblical writings; Exegetical Study asks how a particular Biblical passage fits within the writer’s literary structure, and what the writer seeks to transmit to the audience (for example, why did Jesus have to try twice before healing a blind man, Mark 8)?

The fourth approach looks at Historical Studies, which in some scholarly circles provokes more controversy than any other: when did the writer live, and when did the events he describes actually happen? Fifth, Theological Study seeks to fit varying approaches to a theme into ‘a coherent whole that lets us see a theological teaching in its complexity rather than in some simplicity we might impose upon it’. Finally Devotional Study helps us respond to the message which comes through a particular portion of Scripture.

This volume’s a bit more technical, replete with information/questions you might not have known or considered, like:

* there’s almost 5400 different manuscripts of at least part of the Greek New Testament available to us

* Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria 367 C.E. was the first person we know about to list the 27 books of the NT we have in most of our Bibles

* Is the story of Jonah in some way an ironic parody: teaching us how *not* to be an authentic prophet?

* comparing various contemporary Bible translations, how do they deal with concepts like expiation/propitiation? Or explain in an English equivalent any one of the meanings of Paul’s use of the term ‘the flesh’? (And I’ve read the Living Bible translation, but don’t remember ‘a spattering of four-letter words in Samuel’)!

My favourite section is Appendix 5 which compares various translations in terms of how they deal with such problems.

Butler recommends The Anchor Bible Dictionary, and works by people like Karl Barth, Walter Brueggemann, Raymond Brown et. al. – together with a bevy of conservative scholars like FF Bruce and Leon Morris.

Fascinating!

Rowland Croucher
jmm.aaa.net.au

July 13, 2011