N.T. Wright, in his recent book Scripture and the Authority of God, suggests some of the ways in which the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ have misread Scripture.  Here are some of the items in Wright’s list:-

Misreadings of the ‘Right’

• the openly dualistic ‘rapture’ reading of 1 Thessalonians 4
• the explicitly materialist ‘prosperity gospel’ understanding of biblical promises
• the support of slavery
• the endemic racialism of much Western culture
• undifferentiated reading of Old and New Testaments
• unacknowledged and arbitrary pick-and-mix selection of an implicit canon-within-a-canon
• support for the death penalty
• discovery of ‘religious’ meanings and exclusion of ‘political’ ones, thus often tacitly supporting the social status quo
• attempted ‘biblical’ support for the modern state of Israel as the fulfilment of scriptural prophecy
• an overall failure to pay attention to context and hermeneutics

Misreadings of the ‘Left’

• the claim to ‘objectivity’ or to a ‘neutral’ reading of the text
• the claim that modern history or science has either ‘disproved the Bible’ or made some of its central claims redundant, undesirable, or unbelievable
• the attempt to relativise biblical teaching by appealing to Enlightenment-generated ‘principles’ (e.g. ‘tolerance’ or ‘inclusivity’)
• misrepresenting and then setting aside biblical teaching on, say, divorce, women’s ministry, and slavery
• discovery of ‘political’ meanings to the exclusion of ‘religious’ ones
• the proposal that the New Testament used the Old Testament in an arbitrary or unwarranted fashion
• the claim that the New Testament writers did not think they were writing ‘scripture’, so we shouldn’t think that either
• discredits the canon (and privileges certain non-canonical texts) by pointing out that the church took a while to settle it

Comment

Wright admits that this approach risks polarization.  D.A. Carson, in his review of Wright’s book, characterises such polarisation as, ‘there are twits to my left, and twits to my right, and I am situated in the sensible middle’.  This, says Carson, is a standard, and unobjectionable, rhetorical ploy, except that, among other things, it masks the qualitative differences that exists between conservatives and liberals.