We’re going to use this space to talk about what Walter (“Buddy” if you’re cool like that) Shurden identifies as the Four Fragile Freedoms in his book The Baptist Identity. If you’ve ever wondered what it means to be Baptist, which many of you indicated that you do, then I highly recommend this book to you as an introduction. We’re going to consider one of the freedoms per article. I don’t know if I’ll be able to manage 4 in a row, but I’ll definitely publish them all this year, so keep reading.
The first freedom is what Shurden calls “Bible Freedom.” Now, the Bible doesn’t belong to Baptists, but we do have a fairly unique approach to reading the Bible. Bible Freedom is the historic principle that every believer has the freedom to read and interpret the Bible for themselves, which may sound fairly ordinary now. It wasn’t 500 years ago!
Reading and even holding a book were privileges for the educated elite. Reading the Bible was a right reserved for clergy approved by the ecclesial powers approved by the Church. Even with the advent of the printing press and the firestorm of the Reformation, most believers were still illiterate and relied on things like creeds (brief statements of belief) or catechisms (memorizing church doctrine) to understand the will of God and the testimony of Scripture.
Baptists, by contrast, came to champion the cause of literacy and insisted that the Scriptures be put in the hands of all people, because each believer was a priest who related to God personally. (We’ll touch on this idea in another article). The Bible was seen as too vital, too important to understanding how to follow Jesus, that it would be wrong to keep it from believers. Anyone remember a time where you got graded on whether or not you brought your own Bible to church?
Perhaps you see the danger here. If everyone is allowed to read the Bible for themselves, what’s to stop someone from reading it poorly? That’s the price of freedom. Freedom necessitates responsibility. Just because I’m free to drive on the roads doesn’t mean I can go 85 mph down the Turnpike, even if that were legal. Why? Because I also have a responsibility to keep others safe, including those white-knuckling the dashboard of my car! Just because we are free to read the Bible doesn’t mean that every interpretive idea we have is right or good. We have a responsibility to read the Bible well.
We can do that by educating ourselves on good technique (don’t read verses in isolation, learn how to look up words in their original languages, don’t try to make the Bible say what you want it to say), but for my money one of the best ways to safeguard against poor interpretation is to remain in community with fellow faithful believers. Read together, study together. Not because we are legally bound to, but because we are free to do so.
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