This is really the crux of the matter for evangelicals who claim so strongly to stake so much of what they do on scripture. It is the final arbiter in all arguments and it plays a crucial role in the life of evangelicals. Scriptural interpretation and meaning therefore is of the utmost importance.
Before I ever understood any of this, I first encountered the Bible through its stories in Sunday School in the mainline church I grew up in. For the life of me, I can't recall any of what was taught in confirmation there. I'm sure we must have had classes of some sort (maybe they were on Sunday mornings?), but I can't remember a thing about them. All I remember is that when my family switched to the quasi-fundamentalist Baptist church, I had a pretty solid knowledge of the Bible and its stories compared to others in my grade. I'm not really sure what they Bible meant to me - if anything. I was given a red Revised Standard Version Bible when I was confirmed (which I never read). I did, however, read the Living Bible in high school that was also given to me when I completed confirmation by some friends of our family. During these formative years I learned a couple of important uses for Scripture that are probably familiar to many evangelicals:
1. The Bible is a book of God's promises where he meets you and gives you comfort amidst your problems.
2. The Bible is God's guidebook where he gives you important guidelines to live by and where he meets you to correct you in your errant ways.
There you have it. That's what the Bible is good for: personal comfort, promises to claim, and rules to live by. Along the way in this Baptist church, I also encountered arguments of a different sort that dealt with the nature of Scripture itself. Above all, it was God's WORD. I learned words like: inspired, inerrant, and infallible. And I learned about the dangers of not taking the Bible literally, and I heard horror stories about those who had strayed from its plain, literal meanings.
Unfortunately, what I did not learn at that time was that nobody takes the Bible literally. Everybody comes to the Bible with some kind of preconceived structure that helps it make sense. You could call it your own personal hermeneutic, or way of interpreting scripture. That hermeneutic is guided by your own preconceived theological grid, however rudimentary or complex it may be. Saying this does not mean that one interpretation is as good as another, or that "literal" readings should simply be thrown out the window. It just means that we all need to be aware to the best of our abilities of our own preconceptions when we come to scripture.
The best example of this involves the use of the Hebrew Bible or the "Old Testament." When you read a verse from Leviticus, and attempt to understand and apply it in some way, does it carry the same weight as a verse containing Jesus' words from the Gospel of Matthew?* My guess is probably not. You've already made an interpretive decision based on preconceived theological guidelines. Somewhere along the line you learned that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection meant something substantial had changed between the Old and New Testaments, so you know that reading a verse in Leviticus is different than reading a verse from Matthew. This is probably the most simple of distinctions, and it only gets more complex from there based on a multitude of other issues. Yet, at the same time, scripture is simple enough that a child can read it and understand God speaking to him or her. How can this be?
It is because the important thing about scripture is not that it is inerrant, but that it is one of the places where God can encounter us through the Holy Spirit. And not just in a personal way, apart from anyone else, but as a community that reads scripture together.
I guess what I am getting at more than anything else is that for the longest time I wasn't aware of how my own theology influenced my reading of scripture. I thought I just kind of opened it up and understood the plain meaning of the text - that same plain meaning that was available to anyone else if they would just read it and take it seriously. But, I know now that interpretation is more complicated than that. Let me give a couple of examples.
1) My mom called the other day and we were talking about her church. She was comlaining that things there were "too casual." I asked her what she meant, and she said that she was upset about how casually people dressed when they went to church. Then, to prove her point (using scripture as her trump card like a good evangelical) she talked about how God instructed Aaron in the Old Testament to wear certain garb at the tabernacle or temple. This meant that Christians today should also dress differently and more reverently when they go to church today.
I didn't take the time to tease out with her all of the assumptions behind her use of scripture that were absolutely horrible in my opinion, I just kind of mumbled to move the conversation along to some other less ridiculous point. In her theological interpretation, she assumes that the OT temple is somehow comparable to a building today where Christians meet together to worship. She assumes that church = building. She assumes that because God cared about how the leaders of Hebrew worship dressed in the Old Testament, that he must care about how Christians today dress. She assumes that some clothing is more reverent than other clothing. And on and on.
Behind this use of scripture lies the theological assumptions and hermeneutic of a conservative, middle class, 60-something year old white woman, who grows even more conservative year after year. So, how would I have a conversation with her about her interpretation? Her interpretation clearly makes sense within her overall theological framework - but it is absolutely foreign to mine. I think it would be nearly impossible to debate the meaning of the text because really our differences lie at a much deeper level that influences our reading and interpretation of the text.
2) Or, take for example the theologies of John Piper or Joel Osteen/Casey Treat. John Piper's God is a God who is primarily after his own glory. He is big, sovereign, and uses all things for his glory - even the suffering and death of human beings. Piper is not afraid to talk about how God causes suffering - because it all somehow is used for God's glory.
The Osteen/Treat God is all about the self-actualization of human beings. God is after your personal fulfilment - if you do things God's way. He wants prosperity and blessing for you, and you can get there if you stay positive and faithful.
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You could come up with a little God-typology for probably just about anybody - including me. We all get a category of some sort. What I'm saying is that this is the most important level to look at when it comes to scriptural interpretation - our theologies that guide our interpretation. I could argue with Piper and Osteen/Treat all day long about individual verses or passages of scripture, but I wouldn't get anywhere because our differences primarily lie in the theology that guides our interpretation.
It's kind of a circle that you can't get out of. Scripture influences your theology, which influences your reading of scripture, which in turn influences your theology, and so on. So, what does this have to do with me and evangelicalism? My theology doesn't fit with typical evangelical theology anymore. So, I read scripture differently. It's hard to say which came first. Did I start to read scripture differently, which influenced my theology, or did my theology change which influenced the way I understand scripture? Undoubtedly, it was both. But I feel like I am now stuck in a different universe.
* There's a lot that could be said here about the importance of genre, context, and the use of critical tools to aid in interpretation, but there's just not space here.
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