Making sense of the Bible

I like the saying about a follower of Jesus Christ reading the bible on one knee while on the other he had an open newspaper. The bible should be read in dialogue with the news of the world. From my youth I always believed that the Bible to be the Word of God, carrying his authority and I read it avidly together with many books on Christian doctrine. When I was a university student, unknown to me, I came under Dutch Reformed influence. Louis Berkhof’s “Systematic Theology” shaped my ideas about the bible and what it taught. I also recall hearing Klaas Runia defend the bible as the Word of God and not that which merely became the Word of God. I interpreted the bible in a kind of prescriptive manner. I saw it as a handbook of Christian doctrine and prescribed about creation, sin, Christ, salvation and judgement. The way that I read the bible changed, however, after I served as a minister for twelve years on a Glasgow housing estate and now for sixteen years in the centre of Rotterdam. The conditions and problems that people faced need to be taken seriously and not quickly dismissed as the effects of human sin and divine judgement. I think it was when I was in Glasgow preaching through Nehemiah that I realised that the bible could be interpreted descriptively. I used to interpret as a story of spiritual leadership of Nehemiah or the spiritual renewal of God’s people. Without denying these, I began to see new things such as the people left behind. Chapter two contains a long list of difficult names? Who were they? Why were they so depressed? Then I realised that this was the situation with the majority of the 25,000 people on the housing estate who had missed out and were unemployed. There is renewal in Nehemiah but it does not come until chapter nine and there are lots of conflicts to face in between – just like human life you might say! The descriptive approach recognises that the bible is more than prescriptive but actually describes human experience. To read the bible descriptively is see it more like a mirror of human life than simply a book of doctrine. I began to see that all of the spiritual heroes had feet of clay. Every family in the Old Testament would in contemporary terms need to be assigned a social worker. I found the bible had a lot to say about unemployment and poverty in Glasgow and about migration and welcoming aliens in Rotterdam. This is how I came to discover Jesus Christ in Glasgow as the urban Saviour and in Rotterdam as the universal Saviour.