From testimony to handbook

Somewhere along the way we Western "civilized" Bible-readers started interpreting the Bible as if it were a handbook, punctuated by stories.  If you read the Bible as a handbook, you go to where all the "rules" are and then order your life to obey them. The stories may be nice examples, where so-and-so did thus-and-such, and then was either praised or damned for it.
But no one in Western culture read the Bible that way before the "Enlightenment" in Europe. Before that, people read the Bible as testimony, telling the long story of God with people and people with God. What happened? Why did we switch our attitudes (or shift our paradigm)?
Those of us with Christian ancestors had a long tradition of looking at sacred texts, taught to us by our Jewish fore-bearers. They knew that sacred texts are collections of literature with a peculiar ability to "say" things in a profound way as long as people read them together, argued about their meanings and then re-interpreted them in connection with their current lived realities. We used to read the Bible for clues to the adventure of God with humans, not as a handbook of certainties, frozen for all time.
The Enlightenment in Europe did a number on Biblical interpretation.  All of a sudden, no texts were valuable that weren't also "scientific" or "historical." What makes for authority got a thorough makeover. If something wasn't "provable" using current scientific or historical methods of understanding, it wasn't true or reliable.
In a misguided attempt to prove our worth, our Bible-reading communities latched on to the "scientific" and "historical" methods and attempted to fit Bible reading and Bible texts into those paradigms.  It was a bad fit. We're still paying the price. We still want to read the Bible as if it were a timeless handbook for life, showing us where the rules are and spelling out the consequences for breaking them, and that this method is proper because the Bible is "historical" and "scientific." The results have been disastrous.
Let me scream here--NO!!!
Christian brothers and sisters, let's get back to reading the Bible as testimony--that is, the stories of our past, through the collections of writings we have inherited from the communities who have brought us here. They are peculiar stories, with a peculiar ability to tell us about ourselves and who we are in God's eyes. (They even might explain what is meant by that odd phrase--"in God's eyes.") That "peculiar ability" we used to call "the inspiration of the Holy Spirit." It's not a bad term.

Bring your best...

Lent is a strange season, one that seems to go by without being acknowledged by anyone who isn't a church geek. Still, the Lent traditions, including the disciplined reading of holy texts together, are  ancient practices, that put our little-church-with-a-big-mission squarely in the deep history of the mission of Jesus. Bible study is an art form, one we need to keep keen and practiced. There is so much out there that is sloppy, trite, and unhelpful.

Fewer and fewer people are even aware of how much our modern world is letting go of this practice. Let's do better, church geeks.