Teen Biblical Interpretation

[Ron Davis]

It has been too long since anything has been posted to the teen forum so I thought I would give it a shot. One thing I have noticed that has changed with teenagers over the last few years is the way they view scripture. I was showing an evangelistic video from a series where teens are invited to share their opinions. The theme of the video was Jesus' claim to be "the way, the truth, and the life." Many of the teens in the video expressed that they disagreed with the Bible as if the teachings were a matter for debate. I asked my group if the opinions expressed in the video were representative of the opinions of teens in our local high school. The response was yes.

Given that most teens today are clearly postmodern in their thinking how do we teach the authoritative nature of scripture other than to just argue with them.

[Lindsey Grant]

I can kind of understand what your teens are thinking. The main thing is believing the Bible is in fact God's word.
Last year in my Bible class, my teacher got us all psyched that he was gonna show us FOR SURE and for certain how the Bible was true.
His big reason for knowing the Bible was truth was that it said so.
I'm sorry, but that's really a pretty bad reason...I've always believe the Bible as truth, and that kind of shook me that that was all he could get, the best he could do, ya know?
So this year in Bible, my new teacher pointed out that the Bible 'locks itself into time and space,' meaning that it can be checked as acurate because, yes, Herod was the king at that time, and yes, so and so really lived when this happened. It's not just some "long ago and faraway" thing.
And another thing that really helped me was realizing that what God HAS said has happened-that the Bible would be preserved through time (can't think of the exact verse at the moment). And then it hit me-just because something is said in a work doesn't make it true, unless GOD says it. There's a song by the Jonas Brothers band that says "I took a trip to the year 3000/ This song had gone multiplatinum..." and I realized that that was something MAN said in a work about the work, and that probably won't come true; I don't think that song has even gone platinum once! But when God said his word would be preserved, well, it has been, so the rest of it must be true, too, right?

So I don't know if that helps, but that's the way I looked at it.