The Bible is one of the world’s most influential books. It has been a spiritual nourishment to millions worldwide, and its ideas have inspired many poets, musicians, writers, and filmmakers. It is the best-selling book of all time and has been debated and critiqued for centuries. What makes the Bible such an important holy book? How do we interpret it properly?
The Bible contains 66 books filled with poetry, myth, allegory, prophecy, and history. However, there was a long process to officially canonizing the Bible—not to mention how different translations took it from Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic into languages like Latin and English.
The earliest translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek was the Septuagint. Scholars have dated this translation around the third century BC. It was formally canonized at the Council of Carthage in 397 CE. The early church bishops, guided by the Holy Spirit, decided which books would be included in the Bible based on:
what Old Testament texts the rabbis passed downthe Apostles’ teachingsthe early church fathers’ teachingswhat eyewitnesses said about Jesus’ ministryChrist’s teachings and authorityLater events—like the Protestant Reformation, which argued for removing books the Catholic Church had included (the Apocrypha)—affect how we read the Bible today in other ways. For example, sola scriptura declared that the word of God was the ultimate authority, not church leaders. Protestants and Catholics still debate this topic today.
One reason Bible interpretation matters is that it shows us the canonical biblical message, not messages the church fathers spoke against at the canonization councils.
For example, the four gospels are verified as the earliest records of Jesus’ life and his genuine teachings. Books such as the Gnostic gospels were rejected because they did not align historically with the early Christian belief in Jesus of Nazareth’s humanity and divinity. The gnostic gospels reported that Jesus had a wife and children and taught that salvation allowed people to escape the physical world (gnosis). Achieving gnosis meant finding secret inner knowledge, leading to a spiritual awakening. In contrast, orthodox Christianity, as the Apostles taught it and as the Nicene Creed summarized it, teaches that salvation in Christ comes through faith and repentance. Furthermore, it says that Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection give humans hope that ties the spiritual and physical world together. As the book of Revelation reports, believers await not becoming pure spirits in heaven but the marriage of heaven and earth in the New Jerusalem.
We know that Bible interpretation matters because it helps us understand the biblical texts. We may ask: how do we interpret it?
Exegesis, studying a biblical text, has many tools. One of its key tools is hermeneutics, the practice of studying a passage or book of the Bible. Hermeneutics has four major types of biblical interpretation:
Literal: looking for the text’s original intent, the plain original meaningMoral: looking for the text’s moral lessonsAllegorical: looking for a second, symbolic layerAnagogical: reading the Bible as a guide to the futureSeminaries and Bible schools worldwide teach how to use these interesting and important disciplines to understand the biblical narrative in all its complexity.
Using hermeneutics in the four ways described above helps, but it sometimes emphasizes the text’s pieces more than reading it as a story. They can also be used in a very rationalistic, dry way.
This has partly to do with a shift about a century after the Reformation. The Enlightenment emphasized a rationalistic approach to theology and other disciplines. In this view, we respect the Bible by treating it entirely as a collection of teachings, not emphasizing its context or considering whether storytelling has value. New Testament theologian N.T. Wright argues that we do the Bible a grave disservice if we treat it like an academic textbook to look up any quick answer to life’s problems.
Another approach, what some scholars would call narrative hermeneutics, is much healthier than the Bible-as-textbook approach. Reading the Bible as a narrative invites us on an exciting adventure that can transform how we read it.
What makes the story approach to the Bible different than a systematic theological approach? To our twenty-first-century minds, “story” and “Bible” may look odd in the same sentence. We tend to think a story is something that might convey some moral truth about what it means to be human, but it is still false. The novelist, poet, literary critic, and lay theologian C.S. Lewis challenged this view of story.
Lewis’ literary criticism training allowed him to read the New Testament in its original languages. Yet, to Lewis, the Bible was not a reference book that offered quick answers to dilemmas. It was a true story, revealed by a God that loves humanity with an agape love.
To Lewis, storytelling could reflect transcendent truth. Growing up in County Down in Ireland, Lewis’ imagination was nourished by the great Celtic myths of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England. However, he struggled to reconcile his love for stories with logical empiricism. In this view, anything that cannot be explained by rational thought is a delusion, wishful thinking.
Lewis’ Oxford colleague and friend, J.R.R. Tolkien (later known for writing classics like The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings), helped Lewis to understand that myths reflect truth. Their essential ideas, the ones that speak most to our hearts, point us to “the true myth,” the story God is telling. Sometimes, the myths even seem to have hints that God placed in the human psyche, preparing us for future events. The common myth of a dying and rising god that Lewis found so compelling in Norse mythology was a myth that came true when Jesus of Nazareth arrived.
This view of the story as having value, that it can teach us things that other methods cannot, changed everything for Lewis. He became a devout Christian with a great reverence for the Holy Scriptures.
Many people have taken similar journeys, learning to love the Bible through the power of story. For example, modern author Andrew Klavan discusses in his book The Great Good Thing how an existential crisis led him from staunch rationalism to appreciating storytelling and finding that Christ is the great storyteller.
We may still worry about reading the Bible as a story, particularly if we are used to biblical inerrancy—the view that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God. At least in the popular image that many Christians hold, inerrancy means that we need to see the Bible as something error-free text that God directly downloaded into the writers, and they pasted the results verbatim.
Whatever we believe about the official definition of inerrancy, we should know that it’s possible to revere Scripture without seeing it as completely error-free. Early church fathers, such as Chrysostom, Ignatius of Loyola, Justin Martyr, Polycarp, and Irenaeus, all had a high view of Scripture, believing that the Holy Spirit inspired it, but also written by fallible human beings. Modern theologians and writers have written extensively about how to emulate that approach. Books like Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God and Philip Yancey’s The Bible Jesus Read are immensely helpful.
The body of Christ is very diverse. All Christians believe the Bible is divinely inspired. Some Christians believe that the Bible is also infallible on every point—from offhand historical details onward. Others believe the Bible is divinely inspired, but since it was written by fallible human beings, to say that it is without error is wishful thinking.
Regardless of our belief in inerrancy, we must remember that the Bible is a story, and stories have value. As Wright says in Surprised by Scripture, the Bible is the book God meant for humanity to have: a sacred story filled with different genres of literature, proclaiming the reality of Jesus of Nazareth as “the Word of God.”
Justin Wiggins is an author who works and lives in the primitive, majestic, beautiful mountains of North Carolina. He graduated with his Bachelor's in English Literature, with a focus on C.S. Lewis studies, from Montreat College in May 2018. His first book was Surprised by Agape, published by Grant Hudson of Clarendon House Publications. His second book, Surprised By Myth, was co-written with Grant Hudson and published in 2021. Many of his recent books (Marty & Irene, Tír na nÓg, Celtic Twilight, Celtic Song, Ragnarok, Celtic Dawn) are published by Steve Cawte of Impspired.
Wiggins has also had poems and other short pieces published by Clarendon House Publications, Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, and Sweetycat Press. Justin has a great zeal for life, work, community, writing, literature, art, pubs, bookstores, coffee shops, and for England, Scotland, and Ireland.
He is a cross pendant.
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He will mail it out from Jerusalem.
He will be sent to your Side.
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