Episode 295: Christianity 202, Part Two--How Not to Misread Scripture

One of the challenges with reading the Bible honestly is that it doesn't work like a reference manual or a cookbook, but rather like a library of many voices from different times and places.  And that means it can be tempting for us to come to the Bible when we have questions about ethics, practice or contemporary issues, and only to read as far as the first answer that confirms our assumptions and reinforces our own agendas, rather than looking more deeply at what God is saying to us in our present context.  Especially for Christians, who strive to read all of the Bible through the lens of Jesus, the question isn't simply, "Does X or Y happen in the Bible?"  but rather, "What is Christ-like?"  And all too often over the past twenty centuries of Christian history, people have deliberately [and sometimes unwittingly] read the Bible in ways that allowed them to maintain power or position at the expense of others, with a set of Bible verses used to prop up their position, rather than asking what the way of Jesus calls them to do.  Today on Crazy Faith Talk we'll look at a couple of case studies for how to avoid misusing the Bible that way, highlighting the stories of the immigrant widow Ruth and the Ethiopian eunuch to see how we can avoid abusing the Scriptures and how to get better at reading through the lens of Christ.