Reading The Bible

When we read the Bible, then, we need to learn to pay attention to the understandings of reality which permeate the text. Unless we do this, we may fail to discern what is in fact present to the text & to the church. For the believing community is always confronted by the text as summoning it to make a new decision about perspective.
Thus one main reason why we read scripture is so that we may not settle easily for any other notion of life, forgetting who we are and the understanding of life that we have confessed and embraced. Informed by the Bible, we are invited to live in faithful response to this faithful covenant partner. Such a possibility is not guaranteed by Scripture study, but it is peculiar to our faith tradition and provides us with a context for living quite different from the reigning alternatives. In other words, one of the most important gifts the Bible can give us is the frame of reference for our lives. Given that frame of reference, we are still left with major decisions to make about our world, our freedom, and our responsibility. But scripture reading can provide us with resources & images enabling us to understand, embrace and respond to life in terms of the vitality of being in history with a covenantal partner who speaks newness in a world which always seems fatigued & exhausted.
(Walter Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense)