The Bible and Me

For the first time in my career, I am teaching a course devoted to the study of Scripture. Titled “The Bible and Its Interpreters,” the course introduces students to the field of biblical hermeneutics. After a couple of weeks sketching the Bible’s creation and content, the course surveys various interpretative approaches, beginning with historical criticism and ultimately ending with ecological readings. It’s been interesting to accompany my students as they explore the material. Unlike them, I am not surprised by the existence of different canons nor the wide variety of critical lenses through which to read a single passage. Yet like them, I hope, I have become increasingly self-reflective about my relationship with the Bible, both personally and professionally.

On the first day of class, one student asked what translation of the Bible we would be using in the course. I responded by saying that students could use any version that they liked as long as they disclosed it clearly on assignments or in class. ESV, KJV, NLT, and NIV have proven to be popular choices, offering some insight into students’ religious backgrounds. As we’ve explored some of the differences between translations, I’ve grown more curious about how my own religious perspective has been shaped by the translation I was raised with – the NIV.  Why the NIV when there are so many alternatives? It is probably because I am a child of the 80s and born to a father ordained in the Christian Reformed Church in 1980, the year that the Synod approved the NIV translation for use in worship.1 Had I been born in a different year, to a different family or in a different Christian denomination, I likely would have claimed another translation as my own. In truth, a great deal of happenstance was involved. Though I now prefer to read the NRSV, no doubt linked to my professional formation at a United Methodist seminary, the NIV translation, with its spare headings and harmonizing tendencies, has left its mark.2 The words and candance of the translation feel right to me in a way that no others do so easily. Such familiarity has power. At the same time, I don’t know if my understanding of Christianity would be radically different had I been raised with a different translation. More influential, I think, would be a change to the people that I have read the Bible alongside over the years.

It’s also been interesting to reflect on Scripture as a Christian ethicist. To prepare for this course, I’ve read a wider selection of biblical passages and studied them more closely than I have in the last few years as a scholar. The experience has highlighted how infrequently I interpret specific passages from the Bible in my own work. It’s not that Scripture does not inform my scholarship but rather that I draw on other sources more directly and deeply.3 To use the framework of the Wesleyan Qualiteral, particularly as presented in Margaret Farley’s work, engaging with certain conversations within the tradition of Christian moral theology and insights from contemporary lived experience play a much more significant role.4 Teaching this course has prompted me to reevaluate things.

I’ve found the 2018 book, Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life: A New Conversation, to be one helpful resource.5 From the start, its authors emphasized that Christian ethics and biblical ethics are not and should not be collapsed into the same thing. They offer a couple of reasons for maintaining this distinction. For one, Scripture is a collection of diverse documents, emerging from a variety of social contexts, and, as a result, there is and cannot be any singular ethics discovered in the text and adopted authoritatively as a Christian ethic. They also note that a solely biblical approach is not well-equipped to fully address the significant disconnect that can exist between the moral challenges and social forces faced by Christians today and those navigated within biblical passages. In sum, the authors argue that Christian ethics is distinct from the work of discerning morality within biblical texts, which is more the work of biblical ethicists.6 At the same time, the authors emphasize that Scripture ought to be formative and normative for those doing Christian ethics. Even if Scriptural interpretation is not central to a Christian ethicist’s work, the Bible ought to remain a privileged interlocutor. The remainder of the book explores what this could look like in practice. At this point, I’m still discerning how I might concretely incorporate these insights into my scholarship going forward. More than anything, this experience has reinforced for me the value of teaching in general, but especially outside one’s narrow area of specialization. Doing so can create needful opportunities for new learning and critical reflection.

Notes:

1. Christian Reformed Church, “Bible Translations,” https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/bible-translations
2. These features of the NIV translation are not mine alone but highlighted in the first chapter of An Introduction to the Bible. Rogerson, J. W. An Introduction to the Bible. 3rd ed. Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2012.
3. I’m not unique in my spare use of Scripture. A number of Christian theologians, including Brian Brock, have pointed out this trend within Christian ethics, noting that “academic biblical scholars and Christian ethicists have been methodologically estranged for some decades.” Brock, Brian, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Eerdmans, 2007), xi.
4. For more, see Farley, Margaret. Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. Continuum, 2008.
5. Birch, Bruce C. Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, and Larry L. Rasmussen. Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life: A New Conversation. 3rd ed. Augsburg Fortress, 2018.
6. One example of biblical ethics is New Testament Ethics: Revisiting The Moral Vision of the New Testament, published earlier this year. Rather than starting with a specific moral question as Christian ethicists usually do, the essays in this collection first examine different interpretative approaches to the New Testament and exegete specific passages to highlight central ethical teachings across specific biblical texts. The resulting insights are then applied to a variety of contemporary moral questions. Hunt, Cherryl, Nicholas J. Moore, and Timothy J. Murray, eds. New Testament Ethics: Revisiting The Moral Vision of the New Testament. Eerdmans, 2026.

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