How many Bible studies have you attended in your life? I can say that I've attended my fair share, both as teacher and as participant. There are few things in life that I love more than gathering together with a group and working through Scripture together. In particular I love it when there is a good, robust discussion about God or Christ or something that challenges us.
Having primarily been the discussion leader the past several years, I can tell you that it can be tricky to come up with good questions that stimulate conversation. It's something that I've gotten significantly better at over the years, but it can still be a challenge. There is one question that I hear a lot of teachers or discussion leaders ask that for a long time I used to absolutely hate.
"What does this verse/passage mean to you?"
My dislike of this question began while studying Bible at Harding. I was learning all about context, hermeneutical methods, and exegesis. We had it drilled into our heads that any given text had to mean what the original author meant it to mean. In other words, there was an objective meaning to every part of the Bible and our job was to, through careful study, discover it.
After only a few weeks at Harding I was attending a Bible study and the leader asked this question after reading a passage from the Sermon on the Mount (I don't remember what exactly). People in the group started explaining how what Jesus had said made them feel, and the responses ranged from comfort to anger to confusion to one guy rambling about some very specific issue that no one else cared about. I, having now been enlightened to the way of true Bible scholarship, was quietly seething. Who cares what you felt the passage meant? What matters is what Jesus meant!
I'm slightly ashamed to say that I stopped going to that Bible study after that because that question was asked. My fellow Bible majors and I would often discuss with distaste how other people just didn't get it. After all, the Bible was too important a thing to be left to the personal feelings and whims of individuals. True interpretation needed to be done by those that understood context and the original languages.
I carried this animosity for this simple question for years after that. I was always very careful not to ask this question if I was ever leading a Bible study or teaching a class because I thought it was counter-productive. I attempted to ask questions that got people thinking about the context of the passage rather than what they felt about it.
As the title of this post indicates, I no longer hate this question. In fact, I actually now think that it is a very important question to ask. I've realized that the real problem was not with the question itself, but rather with the lack of follow up and shepherding that should have accompanied it.
We need to be honest about how we, as individuals, read and hear things through our own biases and personalities. Asking "What does this verse/passage mean to you?" is actually a simple way to begin to unveil those things. The very fact that this question can elicit, on the same passage of Scripture, so many different answers shows us that our unique biases and thought processes play a much larger role in Bible study than we often acknowledge.
The important piece that is so often missing with this question is the follow up. Too often we ask this question, let everyone answer, and then move onto the next passage. What needs to happen is engagement with these different answers with the context and research about what the author intended. We shouldn't just move on without engaging people's answers just as we shouldn't avoid the question in the first place by focusing solely on exegesis and research.
When we fail to engage and follow up on those answers and just move on instead, it places our individual interpretations and feelings become the primary authority on what Scripture says. When we skip the question entirely we don't address the biases and filters people have that can dramatically affect the way they read Scripture. What we need to do is both things. We need to be willing to engage people's preconceptions and gut feelings about passages head on with the research and context that points to the original intent.
So please do ask "What does this verse/passage mean to you?" Just don't forget to engage people where they are at. Ask follow up questions. Bring up context gently and with the intent of helping others grow and not as a hammer to wreck others with. Remember that the process of studying Scripture is a two way street. It is the intersection of what God is saying through the authors and how we read it now. The goal is not to eliminate one side or the other, but rather to conform how we read it now to what God is saying.
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