In our hour-long theology breakfast on a Sunday morning, we are currently doing a track on how to read the bible well. We are looking at basic tools to help us read the Bible, indeed, to help us legitimately understand any text we might read. They are basic tools, but vitally important ones, because they help us understand what the Bible is saying on its own terms.

The reason these things matter is two-fold. First, and perhaps most obviously, if God has revealed himself to us in the form of a book, we surely have to assume he expected us to understand him. If he has something to say to us at all, we surely have to be able to discern what it is he is actually saying.

If I write a letter to my friend, I would find it very odd if they decided to simply start in the middle, to treat my friendly letter as though it were a historical document, skipped bits and decided to read themselves into the stories I was telling them about the holiday I have just been on. We all know that is not a sound way to understand whatever it is I had to say.

Which leads to the second reason this matters. If God has made himself known, our task is to understand what he intends to communicate, not to simply impose whatever meaning we want on the text or drag out verses willy-nilly in order to justify our own interpretation. God has spoken to us and that only has any value if we are intent on understanding what he intended to say. If that isn’t our goal, we are really just speaking to ourselves in a weird feedback loop and then claiming God has said it.

But if God has something to say and he has written to us to communicate something specific, we have to have some ability to understand what he says. Some will insist that the Holy Spirit will simply make it all known to us so we don’t need to worry about things like understanding context and genre. But if that was really true, it begs the question why God has written anything to us at all? If all we need is the Holy Spirit and he will make everything known to us without the need to get to proper grips with the text, it begs the question why he hasn’t just beamed God’s thoughts into the hearts and minds of the elect without bothering with difficult and, frankly by their own admission, fairly ineffective means like prophets to convey his Word?

Whatever we think the specific answer to that is, it doesn’t change the fact that God has chosen to communicate to us in writing. He communicates to us through various authors, in a number of different styles, each writing with their own personality and yet each truly and properly writing what God intended to convey. If God has communicated to us this way, we need to have some way of understanding what he intends to convey.

One of the great things about the Bible is, whilst it isn’t exactly like any other book, the principles of reading and understanding its words are like reading other books. We need to understand the kind of literature we are reading. We need to understand the context of the words, sentences, paragraphs, sections and book order. We need to see how the writers use structure and rhetorical devices and other things to convey their points.

These principles aren’t unique to the reading of scripture, they are the means of reading and understanding any text and getting to grips with what it is the author is trying to say. In the end, imposing meaning on any text is all well and good, but if we don’t understand what the author is trying to say all we are doing is speaking to ourselves. That is just as true as it is reading the text of a novel, a letter or a history textbook as it is when it comes to reading the Bible. If the Bible is God’s means of communicating with us, and we don’t just want to speak to ourselves and pretend it is God talking, we need to understand the text on its own terms otherwise we haven’t really understood anything outside of ourselves at all.