When we finish this week's reading (Chronicles to Nehemiah), we'll be about halfway through the Old Testament. Reading Kings and Chronicles back-to-back is quite interesting. I find Kings to be a "just the facts, m'am" kind of account. You know: the author tells which kings "do evil in the sight of the Lord" and gets punished and which are righteous. It's all very cut and dried.
Chronicles is variously interpreted as the "priestly side of the story" (and there sure are a lot of priestly geneologies) or the "theological interpretation" of the same history. It seems to concentrate more on the retribution the Lord sends down on the apostate kings than on the many bloody battles recounted in Kings.
What are we to make of these books? I overheard a discussion in one of our Sunday School small groups. The group was trying to apply their reading to the recent hurricanes, both Katrina and Rita, and tried to figure out if the hurricanes were some kind of judgment of God like in the Old Testament. After a few minutes of discussion I was relieved when the group leader observed that as Presbyterians in the reformed tradition, we interpret the whole of scripture, not just isolated books or verses, and that this discussion should be revisited when all of the Bible had been read. Everyone seemed quite satisfied with that idea and they went on to the next subject.
It's that type of "proof-texting" (using verses without context to prove your point) that leads to statements like those from a couple of Houston preachers just after Hurricane Rita passed that the Lord was unhappy with Louisiana because of its gambling casinos. That's why I think the Bible in 90 Days program is ultimately such a wonderful idea--by reading ALL of scripture you gain a panoramic view of the Bible rather than a narrow and constricted one.
So far we are doing pretty well keeping people committed to their reading. We started with 122 people registered for the course and I estimate that we have 85 to 90 still attending their group meetings and reading. As you would expect, the attrition rate is lower in the smaller groups and higher in the larger groups.
2 comments:
I'm not entirely sure we all don't proof text. Maybe with more sophistication, but still there is a tendency to read what we want and ignore those items that don't agree with our viewpoint.
That's a good point. It's human nature to emphasize the verses that we agree with and try to overlook those that we don't.
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