The Emerging Scholars Blog

This was the top hit on my Creative Commons' search for "Bible study." Insert your own metaphor!

Today, I’ve been invited to a faculty Bible study at Northern Kentucky University, and I hope that my schedule will let me attend. InterVarsity is committed to building “witnessing communities of students and faculty,” and group Bible studies are an integral part of those communities. With our upcoming ESN Book Club discussion of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, we’ll have more opportunities to talk about communities of Christian scholars. (Spoiler! Chapter Six is titled “Building Academic Communities.”) The ESN Book Club starts on Wednesday with a post from Tom. If you still don’t have your copy of Marsden’s book, search your local library or download the Kindle edition. (Did you know there is a free Kindle iPhone app? But I digress…)

Photo: Bible Study BBQ by amanky via Flickr

ESN’s partner, InterVarsity Faculty Ministry, has created a number of Bible study resources for faculty, and I think graduate students would benefit from them as well. Faculty Ministry has collected a few Bible studies written specifically for faculty. On Friday, FM published a new Bible study on 1 Peter, along a daily quiet time guide and several essays related to 1 Peter by Bruce Winter, Miroslav Volf, and Gilbert Meilaender.

If you’ve had good experiences with on-campus Bible studies, how did they help you? What did you study? And, if your experience have been, er, less than great, what were the problems? Did you encounter barriers specific to the academic context?

Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight

Scot McKnight’s new book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible, maps out a method of reading the Bible that recognizes both its authority as inspired Scripture and our contemporary context. McKnight observes that we all “pick and choose” the passages of Scripture that we focus on. The keys, he argues, are reading the Bible within its overall Story (picked up from McKnight’s earlier book, Embracing Grace), listening to the person of God speak through the Bible, and trusting both the Spirit and the Great Tradition of the church to help us discern the proper interpretation and application of specific passages. McKnight helpfully distinguishes between reading the Bible through Tradition (which fossilizes the interpretations of the past and elevates the Tradition to authority over Scripture) and reading with Tradition (which honors and listens to the Tradition, but also challenges it when appropriate). Read the rest of this entry »