The whole reason I wrote this post was to convey some of the excitement I felt when I discovered this way of looking at scripture. I’ve been reading the bible for years and years and not really “getting” chunks of it. Yes, looking at historical context in Catechism class helped, but at the time a lot of it had still never clicked. A couple things that bought this around:

Reading N.T. Wright explain in great detail how the “going to heaven when you die” (as typified in much bluegrass music) idea was completely foreign to OT Jews and even early Christians. We are so used to the idea that we carry it with us when we read these old passages and come up with a kind of gnostic reading that is at odds with other elements of the Gospel. No wonder the bible is confusing to us. I imagine other parts of it are just a confusing to the Chinese, coming from yet another angle. I don’t think it’s any kind of requirement to be well versed in the history before you read the bible. By all means, go ahead and read it and let the spirit bring it to fruition in your heart and life. I just find this kind of study to be helpful to me.

This has also helped me to appreciate the poetry and prophecy of the bible more. In the particular fundamentalist background I grew up with, poetry was not appreciated at all. So we read the psalms, but they always felt so rigid. So literal, hard, and cold. I could never quite figure out why some people got so emotional about them. There were other things that were a source of emotion for me: some secular poetry (discovered later), music, finely crafted lyrics, a beautiful painting. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see any of this stuff in the psalms. It’s because I was reading them like Deuteronomy or Romans. By putting myself in the artists shoes and imagining beautiful ways to describe God and his faithfulness and mighty deeds, they suddenly meant so much more.

If you don’t relate to this, then praise God! May the bible continue to grow rich for you and not stagnate. It may seem odd, but trying to read the bible like this actually feels LESS rigid than before for me.

No, what I find disturbing is the tone of the post. It takes a defensive stance that almost challenges the reader NOT to do the very thing you are advocating. For instance, you said, “The author (God, through a human writer) wasn’t EXACTLY writing it for you sitting on your couch listening to your iPod.” Well, duh. But getting bogged down in that view is what trips secular guys up who study the Bible. We have to believe that EVERY line in the Bible has relevance and meaning for us today. I know you are not saying that it doesn’t but getting off on tangents like “The word iPod isn’t in the Bible” has no benefit even for people who view it as literature. I think that there are many ways of studying the Bible without bearing in mind that the audience is 3,000 years dead. I actually think that the audience IS alive and sitting on their couches with iPods. I think it is EXACTLY written for them because it is timeless and we have as much chance of understand and applying its concepts as the guys in beards and robes.

I think viewing it as literature is a good and beautiful thing but advocating it doesn’t mean we toss the baby out with the bathwater and say that we misunderstand the Bible if we don’t take a strong historical viewpoint. History is great but its usefulness is to guide our actions today and the same applies to the Bible.