Walking With Giants

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.