“The New Testament, I suggest, must be read so as to be understood, read within appropriate contexts, within an acoustic which will allow its full overtones to be heard. It must be read with as little distortion as possible, and with as much sensitivity as possible to its different leves of meaning. It must be read so that the stories, and The Story, which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas’. It must be read without the assumption that we already know what it is going to say, and without the arrogance that assumes that ‘we’–whichever group that might be–already have ancestral rights over this or that passage, book, or writer. And, for full appropriateness, it must be read in such a way as to set in motion the drama which it suggests.” NT Wright
So take off your anti-feminist and feminist lenses, set aside your racial, ethnic, cultural biases, lay down your denominational sword and enter into The Story unarmed ready for the experience. Believe me, it’s harder than it sounds.
The lens through which we read Scripture has a direct affect on what it says to us and about us. In fact, I would argue that often times with our lenses we begin to mold Scripture into our own image. We co-opt Scripture for our own purposes and our own cause; rather than allowing Scripture to speak we make it speak, and we make it speak for us.
The challenge is to lay aside our lenses for a time in order to engage with Scripture, to hear what is truly being said–what has been said all along. We then pick back up our lenses and find them a different color, colored with the words of Scripture, reinterpreted and re-understood in light of the words we have allowed to sear themselves upon our soul.
This is the work of reading Scripture…
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