Because you shouldn't read the Bible without knowing it

Reflections published on the Queer Theology website (United States), free translation by Silvia Lanzi

When I was Gospel was taught that the Bible was easy to understand. Everything you had to do was to open it, read it and you would know what God wanted you to know. They had taught us to read it every day, to learn many songs by heart and teach it to others. One of the ways of evangelizing was to give someone the Gospel of John, asking him to read everything, then return and pray with him.

I no longer recommend to people to simply take the Bible in hand and read it. It might seem strange to say, but it is the truth. The fact is that the Bible is a set of books, letters, poems, parables and more, a wonderful, stimulating, deep collection that inspires. But the Bible is also confused, difficult, sometimes boring and complicated.
Certainly you can take the Bible in hand by reading it from the beginning to the end and find it a sense. But what I understand over time is that, usually, for people, it's not easy.

Here are some common things that I hear people say about the Bible:

• They bore or are confused and therefore stop reading it;
• They don't know where to start in order to start understanding it;
• They were educated to read the Bible in a fundamentalist way and have not overcome the thing;
• The Bible was used against them like a weapon and therefore do not trust it.

But they are not only people who grew up in fundamentalist environments who have problems with this text. In some traditions, the lay people are not encouraged to read the Bible at all. In others, even liberals, people tend to react to its conservative reading. For example, even liberal people who would not want to read writing literally, are lost in discussions on the so -called "dark passages" used against gays. They interpret the Bible in opposition to the conservatives (while still allow their rules to guide their reading). Or I heard the liberals tell others to simply ignore the Jewish Scriptures because Jesus wanted to abolish everything! (He didn't want it, or at least not entirely).

To be honest, only when I entered the seminary did I really be able to love and appreciate the Bible in all its complexity. Do you think you have to go to the seminary to be able to read it and understand it? Absolutely not! But it was in me in the seminary who gave an active help to read it and made me know scholars and preachers who gave me the information I needed to understand the text.
The key to really appreciate it and take home something from reading the Bible is to have good information in terms of biblical knowledge.

Before it would be appropriate to inform me a little about the historical context, the type of literature collected in the Bible and have some tools to better understand. In the past every time I read a biblical passage everything I could understand was the conservative interpretation that had been taught to me as a child. I didn't know there were other ways to understand these texts. In reading them, I took it inside my conservative theology and, honestly, much of that conservative exegesis makes me understand these texts that is not currently current in the church.

Do you need a historian to get something out of the Bible? No. But, for example, he can certainly help you understand why Cesare was also called Lord and "Son of God", while in the Gospels read that people also called Jesus with these titles; In other words, understanding the historical context helps to understand what the scriptures really tell us.

So what can people who want to read and learn from the Bible do?

• Make some in -depth reading (we recommend some texts at this link);
• Listen to the biblists you trust and who will introduce you to the texts with a good dose of historical information;
• Read of how we have come to have the formation of the Bible so that you can understand how it must be read.

There are also several books that can be useful. But I discovered, over time, that it is useful to start reading the Bible from the Gospels because they are more familiar and based more on history. (...) I absolutely believe in the power of the revelation of Jesus (and in the biblical narrative as a whole) which can help us change life and the world, but I also think that it is better understood when you can concretely see the rebound in which it moves.

I am convinced that the Bible is not a text to be feared, nor is it something to avoid. But it is certainly better understood and appreciated when you do some knowledge work on the context in which biblical events take place. When you are well informed on the context, you can also appreciate how radical it is and you can dive into the wealth of sustoria!

How the queer perspective it can help you Read the Bible better? In the Bible, over and over again we find God on the margins. This means that God is close to LGBTQ people and in the middle of their experiences. Reading in a queer perspective The Bible can help you see God more clearly.

For this we have put together a series of texts on how to read the Bible collected in our section Queer Bible, full of materials and reflections and some homework at home (don't worry, nobody is classifying you!), texts for one Community of Christians LGBTQ Solidarity, and not only, for its direct supporters and etrosexual people from all over the world, and all within the Gionata project, our online community.

Original text: Why You Shouldn'T Read the Bible

Texts to browse on> Queer Bible