The Last Word 8

In chapter 7 of "The Last Word", N.T. Wright describes how the polarization of left, right, conservative, liberal, modern, and postmodern have resulted in misreadings of Scripture on both sides. He lists these misreadings as falling generally into the "right" and "left".

Some of the misreadings of the right include:

• The openly dualistic 'rapture' readings of 1 Thess. 4
• The explicitly materialistic 'prosperity gospel' understanding of biblical promises
• The support of slavery (not currently, but historically used by the right)
• The endemic racism of much of Western culture (again, generally historically, but some groups still use scripture on which to base their racist claims)
• Undifferentiated reading of the Old and New Testament
• Unacknowledged and arbitrary pick-and-mix selection of an implicit canon-within-the-canon
• Support for the death penalty (which was opposed by many early church fathers)
• Discovery of 'religious' meanings and excluding 'political' ones, thereby supporting the social status quo
• Screening out the Jewish dimension of Paul's writings, Romans in particular
• Attempting 'biblical' support for the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of scriptural prophecy
• An overall failure to pay attention to context and hermeneutics

The misreadings of the left include:

• The claim to 'objectivity' or to a 'neutral' reading of the text (the classic modern position)
• The claim that modern history or science has either 'disproved the Bible' or made its central claims redundant, undesirable, or unbelievable
• The 'cultural relativity' argument: The Bible is an old book that we can't take seriously in a modern world
• Rationalist rewritings of history which use as a starting point the things that the Enlightenment wanted to prove
• Caricaturing biblical teaching on some topics in order to be able to set aside its teaching on other topics
• Discovery of 'political' meanings to the exclusion of 'religious' ones
• The proposal that the NT used the OT in a fairly arbitrary or unwarranted fashion, leading to the conclusion that we can use the NT the same way.
• The claim that the NT writers did not think they were writing Scripture
• Pointing out that the church took a while to settle on the precise canon and using this as an argument to discredit the canon and privilege other non-canonical books
• A skin-deep appeal to 'contextual readings'

Some might disagree with Wright's perspective on this (and might also wonder how he determines that his understanding of these issues is, in fact, correct). But the point remains that people regularly misread Scripture based on their backgrounds. How to reconcile these differences is the subject of the final chapter of the book.