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Welcome to Day 1564 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomBible Study \u2013 Total Objectivity And The Weird \u2013 Meditation MondayWelcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps! Wisdom is the final frontier in gaining true knowledge. Our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, seek out discernment and insights, and boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend; this is Gramps; thanks for coming along on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy Today is Day 1564 of our Trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday. Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy. For you, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. You may utilize structured meditation practices. In my life, Meditation includes reading and reflecting on God\u2019s Word and in prayer. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and making sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you, too, will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind.
We are continuing our series this week on Meditation Monday as we focus on Mastering Bible Study through a series of brief insights from Hebrew Scholar, Dr. Michael S. Heiser. Our current insights are focusing on accurately interpreting the Bible. Today let us meditate on:
Bible Study \u2013 Total Objectivity And The Weird\xb7 Insight Fifty-Five: Total Objectivity in Bible Interpretation Is a Myth
Everybody likes to think they\u2019re objective. We all want to believe we can render opinions or judgments wholly divorced from any external influence or personal bias. We don\u2019t like the suspicion that we\u2019ve failed to weigh all possibilities about what a passage might mean before landing somewhere. That would make it seem like our position on some interpretation point is somehow premature, careless, or unfair. We can cherish the thought, but it\u2019s a delusion.
Absolute objectivity about anything we enjoy thinking about or are forced to consider is an impossible standard. We can\u2019t hope to jettison altogether every past sight, conversation, or experience from our minds that might nudge our opinions in a particular direction. Even if we\u2019re thinking about something or someone with which we have no prior experience, we have our own presuppositions. We weren\u2019t born with those. They are the cumulative result of all our life experiences, primarily how we were raised as children.
Scholars aren\u2019t immune to this struggle. Dr. Heiser recalls one day in graduate school; his professor lapsed into a mini-lecture on what it meant to be a scholar. One of his points was that \u201creal\u201d scholars approach the Bible with no biases or presumptions. Specifically, they bring no prior belief about the Bible to their analysis of the biblical text. Ideas like inspiration and anything else \u201cconfessional\u201d had to be eliminated for the real scholarship to occur.
I appreciated the spirit of the advice. We ought not to filter what we see in the text through any theological grid. But I also had to shake my head. The absence of any religious or theological thought about the Bible is impossible but is a theological statement. The intellectual denial of the idea of inspiration (however defined) will indeed influence how we process the data we glean from the text.

The honest thing to do is to acknowledge the beliefs we have. Every Bible student needs to own up to the fact that they might \u201cbelieve\u201d something only because the thought was handed down to them. Being upfront with that possibility and letting people know we\u2019re trying hard not to filter the Bible through our beliefs fosters accountability. We shouldn\u2019t pretend we are immune from the experience we\u2019ve acquired through past study or our interaction with others interested in the Bible. That\u2019s a fa\xe7ade.
\xb7 Insight Fifty-Six: If It\u2019s Weird, It\u2019s...