Reading the Bible with Its Writers

The Bible is a collection of sixty-six books, written by many different people over many hundreds of years. All of its writers lived in an ancient-world context and thought in ancient-world ways. But as Bible readers today, we live and think in the modern world--which is increasingly a postmodern world. Things that were "e;obvious"e; to them are not "e;obvious"e; to us, and vice versa. For Christians who want to be faithful to the Bible as the Word of God, the time and distance between then and now is a real challenge to navigate. Stephen Burnhope suggests that we won't get it right by collapsing that gap--by just picking the text up and reading it. "e;The Bible says . . . [insert a verse]"e; is not enough. We will mishear both what the human authors were saying and what the divine author was saying. Reading the Bible well starts from reading it with its writers--understanding it as they understood it: what they were saying; why they said it; and how they said it. All of which is shaped and framed by the Bible's "e;big themes"e; that, once we're aware of them, we see running throughout, from cover-to-cover.