Be a faithful reader, regularly and with the eyes of faith. Be an active reader, intelligently and critically. Put the texts in context, read from a tradition and a believing community. Read the Bible as a whole, not isolating passages. Understand the background of each book. Try to understand the consensus opinion about texts. Appreciate the major themes and narratives. Be open to God and his word. Be aware of the continuity and discontinuity. Try to translate the Bible to your life situations
How do you read the Bible?
The New Testament language
The New Testament is important for any further Christian theological development. Twentieth century linguistic analysis has shown the importance of communicative word structures to express realities. Words are human expressions about reality, but words convey meaning and feeling only within an understandable shared grammatical linguistic social structure. The authentic meaning of an utterance does not lie in a dictionary, but within the mind of the expression’s originator. Words exist in a specific historic time and place. However, some words endure and transcend spatial temporal limitations, while other words get lost in a particular misunderstood context. We now know the importance of the post-biblical history of the scriptural texts, the Wirkungsgeschichte, the reception and the interpretation of the biblical texts within a historical context with their varied meanings.
