How to Read the Bible Without Losing Your Mind
A Truth-Seeker’s Guide to Making Sense of Scripture
by Kent Blevins
Foreword by Glen Stassen
Imprint: Wipf and Stock
Does reading the Bible sometimes leave you confused? Do you have difficulty seeing the relevance of the Bible to modern concerns or to important issues in your life? Do you believe Bible reading and intellectual inquiry are mutually exclusive? This book explores how the Bible can serve as a resource for discovering truth. It provides a method that accepts and incorporates the knowledge gained from modern scholarship while also recognizing that truth-discovery is a personal, multifaceted journey. It honors the integrity of Scripture while remaining open to insight from additional truth-sources. In exploring what we mean when we speak of the Bible's authority, it is honest about the challenges presented to modern readers by the cultural chasm separating the biblical writers from today's world. How to Read the Bible Without Losing Your Mind shows how the Bible can be read with full engagement of both mind and heart.
Kent Blevins is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, NC. Prior to his time at Gardner-Webb, he lived and taught in Portugal, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic.
"Starting with the double entendre of the book's title, the author writes with a purpose: to guide novice but curious readers to a deeper understanding of Scripture by incorporating logic and intellectual inquiry into their spiritual journeys. The author delivers this message simply, accessibly, and conversationally, even while recognizing that the content he presents can be both liberating and threatening to readers who join him on the path."
--James D. Nogalski, Director, Graduate Studies in Religion, Baylor University, Waco, TX
"Respecting the Bible means setting aside all the hearsay and our own preconceptions and allowing scholars to help us explore its multi-faceted meanings. Kent Blevins has done our biblically-illiterate culture a great favor in writing this very commendable book. Read it and share it!"
--Kyle Matthews, Minister of Worship Arts, First Baptist Greenville, Greenville, SC
"If you have been looking for a trustworthy guide to reading the Bible with an engaged heart and an open mind, you have found it. In this book, Kent Blevins does what the best teachers always do--he reminds us that growing in wisdom has less to do with discovering the right answers than it does with asking the right questions, and then putting that wisdom to work in ways that matter."
--Barbara Brown Taylor, Butman Professor of Religion, Piedmont College, Demorest, GA
"Here is a resource that offers tools for engaging the text with integrity and rigor to help us reclaim the Bible's voice in the modern conversation of faith."
--Amy Butler, Senior Pastor, Calvary Baptist Church, Washington, DC
"The Bible more often functions as the occasion for soliloquy than accountability. Blevins makes the case for talking less and listening more."
--Ken Sehested, Co-pastor, Circle of Mercy, Asheville, NC