How we interpret the Bible shapes what we teach students. What and how we teach students shapes how they read the bible. I know this because my bible study skills are largely attributable to listening to great bible expositors on the radio when I was a college student and young adult. So, when I read a passage and spot the structure and meaning, it is because of listening to great preaching or teaching in the past. No one has taught me these skills in a classroom. I have in recent years furthered my skills because of books I read and classes I have taken in pursuit of the elusive masters degree.
So, the interpretation of the bible I see youth ministry folks doing either concerns me or encourages me. Rarely am I indifferent to what I see and hear youth ministry folks doing. The first time I was shocked by an interpretation of the Bible came from a guy who talked about Jesus turning water into wine and went on to describe Jesus as the ultimate party animal (90’s reference to spuds McKenzie). While I am sure I have missed the point on many occasion, I never stooped to that level. I am always encouraged when I see people working hard to understand what the meaning was to the original audience before interpreting scripture to todays context and making application. I get concerned when folks don’t seem to make that effort.
I think I have mentioned in the past on this blog that I have seen folks who seem to think that the Holy Spirit will make a passage mean whatever we need it to mean at a given time. It’s actually an optimistic view of scripture that suggests that God can use it to mean what he wants us to grasp at a given time. The trouble is that tradition ought to concur with our understanding of a passage. Then I ran across this blog post or article that mentions the idea of Nuda Scriptura. This is very different from Sola Scriptura in which the reformers believed that scripture alone speaks authoritatively. Nuda Scriptura is the idea that the Bible is self-interpreting, needing only the Christian individual to make sense of it. It’s really not much different to the idea that the Holy Spirit can speak to us from any scripture and mean what he wants it to mean. Either way we rule out the past 2000 years of scriptural interpretation. We rule out the creeds and all those who went before us.
Again, I want to go back to the idea that how people when they are young are taught the Bible, they will carry forth. The student who is in the youth group where a youth minister distorts scripture or believes it means whatever the spirit said to them at the time is in danger of leaving students without a decent hermeneutic. Maybe even left them with a dangerous hermeneutic! The end result is an open door to liberalism or progressive Christianity – which as J Gresham Machen so clearly articulates, is not Christianity at all.
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