Me. Here. Now. Should We Read Our Experiences into the Bible?
A few years ago I visited a mentally disturbed young woman at a psychiatric hospital in our town. As we talked, she showed me her Bible, opened to Genesis one, and told me how the chapter had taken place in her life, point for point in the past few days. Then she proceeded to explain each day’s events as her own last six days. As kindly as I possibly could, I told her, “No, this only happened once in the past, long before you or I were ever born. If you want to be glad because the God who created everything also exists in your life, I affirm your thinking but Genesis 1 was all in the past. It happened once.”
“Oh,” she said, “I see.” Then we had a sensible conversation. At least for the time of my visit, we agreed on Genesis 1.
Extreme, you say? To be sure. The lady’s interpretation, however, was the extreme form of an error frequently made by Christians trying to make sense of their Bibles. Many Christians interpret passages of Bible history in terms of what they are experiencing. Please don’t misunderstand my intent. I am not criticizing application, which can legitimately be many-sided from any given Bible passage. I am talking about the process, which says, “For me, this is that.”
The most refined form of experiential Bible interpretation is the existentialist interpretation technique of Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann, an expert in the New Testament, was convinced that existentialist philosophy laid the right foundation for understanding the Bible. The Bible is not directly God’s Word, he said, but rather God’s revelation concealed in human words. And the truth revealed will be ever new. The believer must experience God himself as he reads. That is the revelation.1
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