28 March, 2024

The Role of Integrity in Bible Study

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by | 15 October, 2015 | 2 comments

By Jason Yeatts

It is possible to study the Bible for a lifetime without really understanding it. Integrity may be the missing ingredient to give us the greatest insight.

We know these passages well, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22); “Not everyone who says to me, “˜Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21); “Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them” (John 13:17).

10_Yeatts_JNThese verses teach us to obey what we read and study in the Bible. They show the close link that exists between Bible study and integrity. To live with God as an integrated and whole individual, each of us must apply the Scriptures to our lives.

This concept sounds simple enough, right? Who among us would teach people not to obey the Scriptures? Who would claim that God”s written Word should not affect our integrity? Who would preach that Bible study cannot change how we live? I don”t know one Christian who claims or teaches such things publicly.

We understand this basic point: Bible study forms our integrity and moves us toward inner transformation. But, is the reverse also true? Is it true that our integrity shapes our Bible study? If so, we might need to rethink how we train people for vocational ministry and reevaluate whom we consider Bible scholars.

Experts without Integrity

Jesus helps us unpack this. In John 5:39, 40, he said to the Pharisees, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”

The Pharisees were Bible-study experts, but they lacked integrity. They knew a lot of the correct religious information yet failed to obey it. No wonder Jesus later rebuked them saying, “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean” (Matthew 23:27).

We miss an important point, however, if we focus solely on the Pharisees” hypocrisy. For all of their knowledge””what we would call Bible expertise””they failed to grasp the heart of the Scriptures. These leaders knew their Bibles backward and forward, but they lacked understanding. They searched the Scriptures for what they saw as important, and yet missed the main thing: Christ himself. They failed to align their lives with Jesus; as a result, they misinterpreted the Bible. Their integrity fundamentally impacted the accuracy of their Bible study.

Study without Experience

We sometimes struggle to see this correlation. Until recently, I had never considered how my integrity shaped my Bible study. Years of Sunday school classes and higher education trained me to view Bible study as a scientific act. I came to believe that it is something anyone””believer or nonbeliever””can do if he or she has the right tools, such as commentaries and lexicons.

This scientific view of Bible study has trickled down from the universities to Bible colleges to commentaries to popular Christian literature to local preachers and teachers over the past 150 years. It now seems natural. The theologian Christopher Hall summarizes our predicament:

[We] have been trained to view the biblical text as an object of study and analysis that differs little from other ancient texts. Indeed, many modern exegetes would advocate the necessity of distancing oneself from the biblical text if one is to make sense of it. . . . If a person has cultivated the necessary exegetical skills, tools and knowledge (e.g., languages, knowledge of cultural and historical background), one can comprehend the biblical text and message, regardless of a response of faith.1

The problem is not that we use “exegetical skills, tools and knowledge” in our Bible study; rather, it is that we treat them as the only instruments for true and accurate Bible study. We have largely ignored our integrity as an essential component for understanding the Scriptures.

One way to understand this””as suggested to me by a mentor””is to consider the difference between a history textbook and a cookbook. A history textbook communicates information about past events. It is self-contained and requires minimal participation from the reader. Learning its content is unrelated to the reader”s integrity. Students read it, memorize key dates and facts, and write a few essays demonstrating basic analysis of historical cause and effect.

This is how many of us view the Bible and how we study it. We primarily treat it as a history textbook that communicates information about God and past events. We read it, memorize it, and do some analysis. Along the way we obey specific commands. But ultimately we see obedience as a result of Bible study, not a central element of accurate interpretation.

Now consider a cookbook. It is full of information. Yet it requires from the reader a high level of participation to understand its content. We could read, memorize, and analyze recipes for a year and not understand them. Recipes are meant to be practiced. They share knowledge about food, taste, and smell that we can know only when we work that knowledge into our fingers, tongues, and noses. The longer we practice cooking, the better we understand and interpret a cookbook.

We know this implicitly. Who would we trust more to teach us the content of a cookbook””a young culinary novice or a grandma with 60 years of cooking under her belt? The novice may know more facts about herbs, but the grandma knows how to create flavors that no book can explain.

This is my point. The Bible is more like a cookbook than a history textbook. It must be practiced. We must drive it deep into our hands and feet and let it train our ears and tongues. The longer we practice God”s written Word, the more accurately we understand it. Just as a grandma”s 60 years of cooking forms her understanding of a cookbook, so too does our integrity shape the effectiveness of our Bible study.

Understanding After Obedience

If what I”m saying is true, I think it requires us to reconsider how we train people for ministry and to reevaluate who we think of as Bible scholars. For me, I was primarily trained to study the Scriptures scientifically. I spent years at Bible college and seminary learning to use a variety of research tools, and I was convinced that with them I could hold my own as a Bible expert and interpret any biblical passage.

Then I met people like Kevin Hart, Bill Klennert Jr., Mike Spence, Don Willis, and Kevin Surface. These men are not formally trained Bible scholars, but they have taught me things about the Bible I never learned in a classroom or from a commentary. They have taken passages I thought I knew inside and out and revealed new, fresh truths about them.

To be honest, these men unsettled me at first. I considered myself the expert because of my formal education. It has become clear, though, that they understand things about the Scriptures that I have not yet learned. Like a novice culinary student, I thought education equals Bible knowledge. These men have taught me that practice in God”s kitchen of obedience can be worth more than a degree on the wall.

I think Eugene Peterson has it right when he says, “A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.”2

I wonder what would happen if we applied this truth in our Bible colleges and seminaries. Would we ever allow a wise but uncredentialed Christian to teach a class on Romans or Proverbs? What would happen if we graded a student”s obedience rather than his or her essays? Would we allow the words of an experienced believer to sit on equal ground with a credentialed scholar? Could we teach students that wise people are just as valuable a resource for Bible knowledge as commentaries?

Some people will push back on these suggestions and questions. But Jesus and experience teach me that integrity is a fundamental component for accurate Bible study. It”s much like cooking. The longer we practice the Bible, the better we will understand it.

________

1Christopher A. Hall, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

2Eugene H. Peterson, Eat this Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).

Jason Yeatts serves as executive minister of adult ministry with Indian Creek Christian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana.

2 Comments

  1. David Cole

    There is no correlation between integrity and lack of biblical understanding. A person of high integrity may have bad understanding and theology and a person of low integrity may have good understanding and theology. One does not come before or cause the other though both are important.

    The Pharisees didn’t follow Christ because their presuppositions of what the Christ would be like was faulty and that was a result of all the false teaching they had received. Had they been more open minded and accepted Christ’s miracles as coming from God they might have challenged those presuppositions and arrived at the truth. But frankly, Jesus hid a lot from them and his Apostles didn’t understand all that much until after he had resurrected.

  2. john allcott

    A brilliant & much needed essay!
    Re. obedience, Francis Chan shares a related illustration (I’ll paraphrase):

    I tell my daughter to go clean her room.
    She walks away.
    She comes back an hour later.
    “Dad, I studied what you told me. I memorized it. I can say it in Greek. My friends are coming over, & we will discuss it together.”
    “Did you clean your room?”
    “Well, no.”

    Re. understanding, Jesus told the Pharisees:
    “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another, but you do not seek the glory that comes from God?”
    They couldn’t believe, because they were full of pride.

    BTW, it was nice that David Cole was away for a while, but now he’s back to his nitpicking, obstinate ways.

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