Friday Focus June 5, 2026

Friday Focus, 5 June 2026

The Bible and Us

In the epistle reading 2 Timothy 3.10 -17, Paul writes:
“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”

We live in what is now being called ‘a post-truth age’ in which Fake News receives as much of a credible hearing as truth itself.

We seem to live in a consumer age in which so many leaders across the world shape their political or spiritual pitches to the public according to what they know will be popular and win them power and influence, often at the expense of what may be more wise, or more truthful, or more helpful. These are difficult days to attempt to proclaim truth – and the voice of the Church is just one more voice amongst a cacophony of competing opinions.

In 2 Timothy 3:13, Paul writes: “Wicked people and imposters will go from bad to worse, deceiving others and being deceived”. And a few verses on, he asserts: “The time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” 

These words echo as true now as they did then.

As Christians, we want to pursue the truth about God. We want to know who Jesus is and we want to understand what having a relationship with Jesus means for our lives.

As Christians, we believe that God has given us the Bible as the way of knowing God and a way of coming into a relationship with Jesus.

The key difference between our approach to the Bible and the populism that has become so rife in our world today is simply this: That, yes, we want to read the Scriptures and be affirmed and comforted. But we also must not be afraid to read the Scriptures and find ourselves being challenged by God and having our strongly held views challenged.

We must not be afraid to be changed and transformed by God the more we read the Bible. That is why Paul says, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness….”

There are key differences between how most Anglicans (and mainstream Christians) approach the Bible and so-called fundamentalists, who take every word literally and claim that the Bible is inerrant and infallible in all respects.

Certainly, Anglicans agree with Paul that “All scripture is inspired by God” but what exactly do we mean by that?

Most mainline biblical scholars and theologians do not believe that the Bible is a record of God’s words literally dictated and written directly down by human beings, but rather, an account of how ‘fallible people’ experienced God in their lives.

We need to remember that the Bible is:

• comprised of 66 individual books;

• written by about 70 or more individual people over a long period of time;

• it includes songs and poems, history and laws, myths and legends, wisdom sayings, and riddles.

These “fallible people’ were inspired by their relationship with God. But the words they wrote are very human words, emerging from within and speaking to a particular historical context.

All scripture thus needs to be read within the context of their times.

Because there is a human element to the Bible, we should not be surprised when we find historical errors, contradictions, different tellings of the same stories, or diverse theological perspectives on the nature of God, humanity, and creation.

It is important to remember that as a Jew, Jesus did not read the Bible literally, but rather, in the Jewish tradition of ‘midrash.’

In midrash, the reader wrestles with the text in order to penetrate its layers of meaning.

That is why it is common in Jewish biblical commentaries to have several rabbinic interpretations of the same text parallel to one another, thus illustrating the depth of the text and the different textual readings that are possible.

The Jewish Bible is full of metaphors that were never intended to be read literally.

If someone says to me, “You’re a bull in a china shop,” it doesn’t mean that I am literally a bull or that I am literally in a china shop. Rather, it’s a metaphor that someone is using to speak a truth about me.

Jesus carries on this tradition by teaching in parables—if we simply read the text literally, we miss the point that Jesus intends for us to take away.

Just as the books of the Bible were written at a particular time and place, we cannot help but read and interpret scripture in light of the experience of our own times and location if they are to remain living texts that speak to our own particular circumstances. It is thus hardly surprising that a first century interpretation of a text will differ greatly from a medieval interpretation or one in the 21^st century—particularly if we believe in a living God who continues to reveal Godself to us.

One might ask, if these texts reflect their human authors, if multiple readings are possible, and if interpretations change, why attach such importance to the Bible? There are several answers to this question.

For all their ‘humanness,’ scripture(s) remains inspired by an experience of and encounter with God. Scripture thus provides an invaluable and irreplaceable record of how we fit into the divine story.

Think about it:  the messiness of human life is clearly expressed through the Bible.

There are:

• wars and battles;

• There’s physical violence and rape and murder;

• There’s betrayal, human failure and weakness;

• There are stories about lying to God, running away from God, ignoring God;

• There are stories about human love and human devotion;

• There are beautiful stories and ugly stories;

• There are stories of courage, stories of shame, stories of hope, stories of despair;

The whole of human experience is contained in the Bible – for good and for bad. 
And that’s what makes it such a wonderful book!

As we read the words of Scripture, we see ourselves mirrored in its pages…our own failures, our own weaknesses, our own beauty and our own ugliness, our own courage and our own shame, our own hope and our own despair.

The Bible is a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected before God.

And having seen ourselves in this mirror, and also having read some of the incredible stories in the Bible about how God can use ordinary people to do extraordinary things, we are then inspired to go beyond ourselves; to transcend our limitations and become available to God to be used by God for God’s extraordinary purposes.

As well as seeing our own fallenness in the Bible, we also see our own potential for what we could be if we submit ourselves to God’s Holy Spirit at work within us. But that means growth and that means change – and we know that both change and growth can be painful for us.

We read the Bible so that we can be comforted and challenged.

We read the Bible so that we can grow in faith and be transformed slowly but surely into the image of Jesus Christ. And that requires that we take scripture seriously—seriously enough to read it regularly, seriously enough to go deeper into the text and penetrate the surface, seriously enough to open our hearts and minds to what scripture has to say to us today, here and now, and seriously enough for it to shape our lives so that we may be “trained in righteousness.”

Norman+