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Throughout my over twelve years of teaching, invariably every year at least one student asks me if I think that all Christians should think alike or believe in one truth. There are, of course, some things that we agree on, I think: God is creator of all things. God sent Jesus; Jesus lived, ministered, was crucified, and resurrected. There is a lot of stuff in between that we differ on in minute and more extensive ways. I think the only way to ensure that all Christians or religious people in general think alike would be by force. It has happened in Christian history when so-called heretics were burned at the stake, for example. God forbid such evil tactics should ever be instituted again. I believe God values diversity of interpretation; the Bible is a testimony to that, if we believe God inspired it (and this is a concept we all should critically process). Human beings are more threatened by diverse interpretations, than God ever will be. If we choose a single interpretation, whose interpretation would we choose? Many interpretations are valid and legitimate. We should seek interpretations, in my view, that are liberating (engender freedom) and relevant to the real lived experiences and circumstances of human beings in their various contexts. KIM: One single authoritative interpretation is impossible because the Bible contains divergent voices in different writings, written in different times. Instead, we must celebrate the diversity of biblical interpretation. Meaning should not be controlled by one person or one special group of Christians or scholars. But at the same time, not all interpretations are equally valid or good. Therefore, we must evaluate other readings, including our own. The Bible Is Invoked in the Public Square by Politicians and Others. What Does the Bible Have to Do with Politics? KIM: The Bible has political implications for our contemporary world. For example, our thoughts and actions about and in our world depend on how we perceive of Jesus and his work. Is he a Jewish prophet who challenged Rome and Jerusalem because of lack of justice? Is he a mere spiritual savior who paves the way to heaven? How can we interpret his proclamation of the kingdom of God? Is God’s kingdom established here or only in another place in the future? Our political involvement in the world may be impacted, depending on how we answer these questions. SMITH: True. It is also important to know that the biblical text itself is full of political intrigue and the mingling of politics and religion. Despite its metaphorical use in the NT, a kingdom is a political entity; the construction of and desire for a nation and nationalism are political ideas and movements. Politics and religion merge when characters in a sacred text assert that God instructed them to take another people’s land and to kill all the inhabitants in the process or even when God is that chartacter. Biblical interpretation is a political act; in a sense it is a meta-political act. It is political when biblical interpretations are used to support the enslavement of entire peoples. It is political when our biblical interpretations impact the social positions we take for or against the poor/poverty, war, foreigners/immigration, gun violence, women’s rights, police brutality, education, and so on. It is political to say which interpretations are more legitimate and which are not or who can produce legitimate knowledge. These types of decisions create a hierarchy of knowledge and knowledge production, and hierarchy is necessarily political. What Does It Mean to Read the Biblical Text Closely? SMITH: In order to read the biblical text closely, I encourage students to try to be aware of the presuppositions they have about the meaning of the text and try to be open to the text and the Spirit of God saying or showing them something new or different. If we understand the God of the text as a living God, then God continues to speak. The text itself may be static as literature, but the God about which it purports to bear testimony is not. We should also keep in mind that God transcends the biblical text. And by this statement I mean that God is not synonymous with the Bible itself. To think otherwise would be to reduce God to a piece of literature, even if it is considered sacred; God becomes an idol, a human made one and one who only fairly recently appeared on the scene with the invention or improvement of writing mediums and tools or the printing machine. This brings me to a second point: The Bible is literature, and it is a tangible medium of communication. It is also an artistic form: portions of it are poetic or poetry; most of the prophetic literature, for example, is poetry. The biblical text contains literary forms that include hymns or songs, historical narratives, parables, metaphors, miracle stories, exorcism stories, and so on.