Many different voices

Sam Norton has written an excellent post on approaches to reading and understanding the Bible. His starting point is that:
"One of the most important things to understand about the Bible is that it is a library of Holy Scripture – that is, there are many different voices within the Bible (even within particular books of the Bible) – and this is of God. That is, it is in recognising both what different books have in common, and where they disagree, that an individual Christian is enabled to come to a mature understanding of the text."

He sets out why the Bible can't be assumed to have one single unequivocal thing to say about a topic and explains historically how the idea that it does appeared within Christianity. With astute illustrations of the issues he raises, this is an excellent post which lays the ground for some examination of particular  texts in future.

See here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for my take on this in a series of posts entitled Divine dialogues.

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Iona ~ Edge of the World.