How to read the bible has been one of the biggest questions that has troubled me in my thoughts about the Christian faith. Things like – how can we base our beliefs, our actions, and our lives on something that was written centuries or millenia ago, in a completely different culture, and something that is at face value just a book. As an English lit student I have been taught to question every text, and have thought a lot about the difficulties of a text being in any way ‘absolute truth’, and when applying these questions to reading the bible, it could be quite difficult to take it seriously at all.

However, on the other hand, I do believe the bible to be in some way at least ‘inspired by God’, and in that case to be taken seriously.

But negotiating the balance between these two ideas in my head has been difficult, and one of the biggest questions arising out of this is often whether we can or should interpret parts of the bible in context, and if we do, whether this might have quite radical implications for our understanding and living out of the Christian faith.

Luckily, upon reading another chapter from ‘The Heart of Christianity’, I found it to legitimise and explain quite well some thoughts that I have had and couldn’t explain very well. Brilliant.

Borg argues that the bible is a human product, and not a divine one. This is key to realise. It is inspired by God, in that it is the story of human response to God, but it is not God’s response to himself. As a result of this, we must understand the bible as ‘relative and culuturally conditioned’ to the time at which was written.

However, it’s important in this case also not to underemphasise the credibility and importance of the bible – Borg argues that it is central to Christian belief, and though human in origin, ‘sacred in status and function’.

My question is whether this ‘cultural conditioning’ means that some aspects of our faith outlined in the bible could now or should now be reinterpreted for our context. It seems to me that Christians can have very different opinions on the legitimacy of such an idea, but I believe it is one of crucial importance to the way we live out our faiths today. There are certain often controversial issues that often crop up (particularly aspects of sexual morality, and the subjugation of women, of course!), and I am interested in exploring these. Personally, I think there’s probably a good case for reading some parts of the bible in a new context, but I don’t really know enough about it to make a very good case at the moment. But I will try and learn a bit more in the next few weeks so I can actually have a valid viewpoint.