First, we get into the text to understand it and to be made uncomfortable by it. We deliberately face up to the difficulties of it by discussing its strangest features. We invite questions about them and the challenging questions they raise. What we don’t do at that stage, or ever, is judge the text.

My third and final Bible study question is probably the most mundane. Everyone asks this in our Bible studies.

I imagine my readers here are convinced, as are most participants in a Bible study, that the Bible should in some fashion change us and will have practical applications to us or to the world around us.

The only point I’d like to make in this post is why I deliberately leave it to last. I complained in the first post in this little series about studies that don’t move beyond comprehension. I think this is most common in the ‘Conservative Evangelical’ world (not conservative evangelicals, but the blue shirts and stone chinos guys)—that’s my experience of it, at least. The opposite extreme is more common in the charismatic world, where the only question asked is how to apply it to ourselves (or worse, what it ‘means to me’).

It’s important to apply, it’s important not to apply too fast.

First, we get into the text to understand it and to be made uncomfortable by it. We deliberately face up to the difficulties of it by discussing its strangest features. We invite questions about them and the challenging questions they raise. What we don’t do at that stage, or ever, is judge the text. We allow the text to judge us. We consistently attempt to deal with the Bible on its own terms.

If we do that well, it will unsettle us. It will challenge us. It will change our preconceptions. It will renarrate our stories.

If we apply before we’re unsettled, we will come up with comfortable applications. If we apply before we’ve understood, we will come up with our preconceived applications.

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