With who are you reading the Bible? – David Bosch continued …

I’ve missed two David Bosch discussions and I’m plodding my way through about 200 pages of reading.  In this post I will reflect on Chapter 5.

Bosch states on p.182 that,

“Any individual Christian’s understanding of God’s revelation is conditioned by a great variety of factors.  These include the person’s ecclesiastical tradition, personal context (sex, age, marital status, education), social position (social ‘class’, profession, wealth, environment), personality, and culture (worldview, language, etc.)”

As an illustration of this Bosch states that ,

“A black migrant worker in Johannesburg, may have a perception of the Christian faith very different from that of a white civil servant in the same city, even if both are members of the Dutch Reformed Church.”

It is exactly because we view reality and Scripture through a specific lens that we must allow ourselves (plural) “to be challenged by the ‘self-definitions’” of other Christians. Precisely because of this it becomes very dangerous when we read the Bible in a monoculture.

It is this attitude of ‘being challenged’ that is putting me on a journey that is really deepening my appreciation of Jesus. Reading the Bible with particularly poor and black friends is changing us in so many ways.

I wonder with who you are reading the Bible and how it is changing you?