Art of Reading Scripture

Naturally your reaction to this book will relate to your own view of scripture and what you think is the "way" to read it and make use of it. So I do understand that some people may not be as interested as I am in the essays contained in this book. It's a book for people who recognize that "inspiration" relates not only to how the actual biblical text came to be written but also how you too are "inspired" when reading it. Thus, you won't find authors here who would agree that every word of the bible is true in the sense of factual. (They may agree, as I do, that something can be "true" even if not factual, and by that I mean that you can learn "truths" from stories which may never really have happened or may not have happened exactly as described. But that nevertheless a spiritual traditioning and interpretive process can truly involve inspiration and even inspired editing in order to pass on true spiritual information, which, read carefully - in the light of past scriptural allusions and where we are on the spiritual path - can provide valuable insight, inspiration, guidance.)It is in this sense, I think, that this book came to be. That a number of scholars are working, singly or together, to provide for us, in our modern day, guidance for how scripture has been read (even from the beginning) and can be read. How we can utilize, for example, methods of interpretation that scripture itself provides (for example in the Road to Emmaus we are given guidance for understanding how to interpret scripture in the light of the Old Testament and meditating on events of the New Testament, etc).I am no biblical scholar and perhaps I haven't quite put my thoughts down as a biblical scholar might - with respect to this book. I'm a retired clinical psychologist. But I find that this way of thinking - that the essays here try to get at - is in accord with the the way our minds work when we leave ourselves open - to change, to inspiration, to hearing allusions from one set of circumstances which resonate with other information we have access to. This way of thinking about scripture rings true for me personally and in terms of my work in psychotherapy, in terms of personal growth and development. Indeed, my training as a therapist has powerfully affect how I "read" or "hear" bible texts - which resonate with so much force, triggering other texts in other parts of the bible, all of this enriching the potential meanings of the text at hand. So imagine a stew, a nutritious stew. And in your bowl you have a scoop or two, from which you can glean all the ingredients that went into the stew - its savor, its aroma, its taste, texture, its heartiness and health-giving qualities.Beyond this book, the editors (Davis and Hays) have also written other very useful books, as have many of the contributors. So if you like this book, you might want to check out the authors' other works - so as to extend your search for understanding scripture.One last thing: I only wish the publisher would make this book inexpensively available on a Kindle for those of us who already own this book (and similar books). (I am a retired person in a retirement community with limited space for displaying my beloved books. But, since books fit so easily all together on a Kindle, I can still have them accessible to me as e-books. Otherwise when I want to refer to certain books, it ends up being a long search through storage boxes...) Amazon, you take students into account. What about us elderly folk who are still in the game?

It really tells you the method that should be used to study the scripture. It gives a great description of each of the 66 books of the Bible. The authors are professor at Regent University and Cornell University.

This book was a requirement for school. The essays, by different people gave insight from a different perspective and I enjoyed reading it.

A wonderful tool for Sunday School teachers, and anybody studying God’s word.

A wonderful book. A help in thinking through some of the key issues of interpretation that are in the forefront of today's issues in the church concerning the Bible.

Very well done, and very helpful in my LCMS Deacon studies.

I enjoyed this book but probably not really touched by it. As I write this review, I remember reading it but nothing just stuck out for me without referring to it again.

From the cover of this book I was really dreading reading it. The collection of essays has turned out to be really quite good. Very unexpected.