Using Scripture

In the book The Family by Jack Balswick and Judy Balswick the first chapter starts with the crucial question, "How can we best use Scripture to learn God's intention for family life during the new millennium?"

They describe the common approach as that of picking out the key verses from the various scriptural passages dealing with the family. The problem with this, and I think that this criticism applies to the method no matter what the subject matter being discussed, is that it so easily leads to selective analysis and faulty synthesis of the passages.

As the authors put it:

This method of selecting certain verses about the family can be compared to strip mining. Ignoring the historical and cultural context, the strip miner tears into the veins of Scripture, throws the unwanted elements aside, and emerges with selected golden nuggets of truth. Too often, searching for God's truth about the family ends up with truth that conforms to the preconceived ideas of the miner doing the stripping.

In all Scriptural reading, it is essential to consider the total context of scriptural passages about family life. Usually the Bible student is encouraged to take a bottom-up approach, starting with the verse itself, then the immediate context, then working up from there.  But a far sounder approach is to begin with the larger metanarrative and ask if there is anything we can learn from the total context before progressively drilling down into the details.

The authors do this by considering the relationship between God and Israel as a fruitful model for the development of a theology of family relationships, based in general on the scriptural descriptions of God in relationship.