Beauty. Context. Imperfection: How I Read the Bible
LAURA HINRICHSEN
What I Believe About The Bible.
What do I believe about the Bible – and what does it mean? Of that, I am uncertain, but I’m finding beauty in its complexities.
The part of the Bible that drew me into Christianity was the way it described love — God’s love for me and for all of humanity. When I made the decision to follow Jesus, I didn’t read the Bible until I became a Christian during my freshman year of high school. That’s also when I immersed myself in (Western) Christian culture — joining a church and attending every Christian youth group, retreat or concert I could fit into my schedule. I was diligently trying to “catch up” to my peers who had grown up in church in my understanding not only of the Bible but also Christian beliefs and how to see the world through this perspective. However earnestly I tried, I still struggled to inherit all of my peers’ beliefs about the Bible and what a biblical worldview looked like.
To me, none of it was black and white. It seemed that the longer I studied it, the more it all seemed to swirl together into a messy miscellany of gray uncertainties. I still remember the frustration and hurt that I felt when a fellow Christian from my school prayed for my salvation when I shared that I believed in God but I didn’t believe that Genesis was a literal account of the world’s — or humanity’s — beginning. I can still recall the stinging I felt in my eyes when a guy from my youth group used what the Bible “clearly” said about gender and leadership to tell me to step down from leading the worship band — even with the reassurance that I could serve just as faithfully as a supporting member of the band. The “biblical” perspective of the world I was presented with in high school seemed so small, so narrow and so exclusionary in comparison to the warmth, reach and invitational aspects of God’s love I encountered in the Bible during the earliest days of my journey into Christianity. I longed to step into a new paradigm of understanding the Bible and encountering God — without sacrificing logic or intellectual pursuits.
Saved By Context (Context is Everything).
This longing to understand the Bible led me to a small liberal arts college in the midst of rolling prairies. What I found was a loving community where I could wrestle with the questions and doubts that I had not only with the Bible, but also with my faith in general. It was in this loving community where I learned that context is everything. Whether the text is a sacred one, like the Bible, or a novel or even a work of art, engaging a text through its historical, cultural, social and even political context can help to create a more thorough understanding of not only the plain text but also its deeper meaning through that contextual knowledge of its author, audience and purpose. It was in this approach to reading the Bible where I learned that the Bible wasn’t written to a 21st Century audience — in fact, it wasn’t even written for a single audience. Though it has contradictions, I found relief in learning that it was a collection of works — some carried down through oral tradition, all captured by different authors at different times in history, with different languages, writing styles, purposes and translations.
Beautifully Complex.
Learning the importance of context gave me such peace and clarity about the parts of the Bible that didn’t seem to hold together cohesively. Of course a collection of books written at different times for different audiences by different authors in different styles (also serving different purposes) would be confusing, contradictory. It’s been the process of seeking to understand these contexts of the Bible that have reignited and sustained my faith — not with certainty, but instead drawn into its mystery.
I’m finding God in the beauty of trying to understand the stories they tell about God at work throughout history. I’m also finding beauty in my own intellectual wrestling with these texts — that sometimes looks like prayer and oftentimes even like dialogue. Even amidst doubts and uncertainties, the mystery of faith draws me into and points me to relationships with God, with friends, with community and with the world and continue to shape how I understand the Bible, myself and the world around me.
An Imperfect Pursuit.
It feels more and more like the mystery is an invitation to an ongoing and deep conversation — not the type that gives me answers, but the type that builds a relationship.
There are a lot of ways to understand the texts contained in the Bible. Will I ever understand them perfectly or completely? Probably not, but I’m enjoying the conversation that the pursuit of understanding draws me into continually. It’s a conversation with no end, and perhaps without all of the answers I seek, but it’s a conversation where I’m finding God in the seeking and perhaps even finding myself in this beautiful and ongoing pursuit of understanding … that I may be transformed by the beauty of this journey …
Additional Guiding Texts in My Journey:
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving and Finding Church by Rachel Held Evans (2015)
Ordaining Women by BT Roberts (1891)
To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donohue (2008)
Living Gently in a Violent World by Stanley Hauerwas (2008)
The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr (2019)
I and Thou by Martin Buber (1923)
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)
The Yellow Leaves: A Miscellany by Frederick Buechner (2008)
The Responsible Self by Reinhold Niehbuhr (1963)
The Synoptic Gospels, Revised and Expanded: An Introduction by Keith F. Nickle (2001)
Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner (2002)
Works of Love by Søren Kierkegaard (2009 edition with foreword from George Pattison)
Laura loves exploring the world through words, stories and travel. She enjoys pursuing these passions through her job as a marketing consultant at Caterpillar and avocationally as an avid reader, solo traveler and worship band leader. She’s slightly skeptical of personality tests but enjoys taking them anyways. (She’s an ambivert – XNFP on the Myers-Briggs and a 4 wing 5 with a fledgling 3 wing.) Ask her about Paris, the ocean, the west coast of Ireland or the Outer Hebrides to spark a joy-filled and animated conversation.