The Bible is ultimately (just) a means to the end of understanding Jesus (and Christianity)

How should we read The Bible? 

All possible answers to that question are necessarily based upon non-Biblical (extra-Scriptural) assumptions - and yet how* we read the Bible tends to determine, or at least substantially shape, the nature of a person's Christianity. 

(*And there are many ways of reading The Bible - see the beginning of my Lazarus Writes - even currently among Christians; as well as among the much greater numbers of pseudo-Christians and not-Christians.) 

My conviction is that we ought to read The Bible as a means to an end; and that "end" ought primarily to be: to know and understand Jesus Christ, what he did for us - and what this implies for me. 

I say this in context of an overall belief that some of The Bible was written with the help of divine inspiration; and that this (by my judgment, and for people such as me) especially applies to the King James or Authorized Version (which is therefore significantly autonomous in relation to the versions from which the KJV was "translated"). Divine inspiration makes the source potentially more likely to be valuable to my personal quest - but is not an absolute; and cannot be.   

In other words; we should (and I do) read The Bible as a source of ideas, rather than a set of instructions; nor is The Bible an objective and imperative historical account that of itself is supposed to tell us who Jesus was and what he did - and what we ought to do about it.

The Bible does Not of-itself answer such fundamental questions - and clearly cannot, because communication entails interpretation. 

What reading it may (or may not!) do is provide us with some ideas, some accounts, possible descriptions, concepts etc; any of which we may personally use (or reject) as leading us towards a state of understanding and personal affiliation. 

The bottom-line is Not The Book, nor any particular translation of The Book, nor any particular set of theological expositions of how to read The Bible, and descriptions what it means... 

Instead the bottom-line is what we feel convinced about, what our deepest and most considered intuition tells us actually is the case, here-and-now, and what we personally want and need to do about it.    

Otherwise stated; we are personally responsible for whatever truth we get from reading The Bible; we therefore use The Bible as a means to the end of getting an understanding that we personally can take responsibility for. 

The obvious objection to this is that surely this is compatible with reading-into The Bible whatever we most want to find in it. 

Lots of people have done, and continue to do, this - indeed to anyone who disagrees with a Biblical interpretation, this seems very obviously to be whatever the other person is asserting. 

For instance: Conservative Evangelicals see Liberal Christians as reading-into The Bible modern left-wing political ideology; while the Liberals see the Evangelicals as using The Bible to justify conservative social attitudes. 

How can we avoid mere self-gratifying wishful thinking? 

The fact is that if we want to fool ourselves, if we want to discover that The Bible (in the way that we choose to read and understand it) merely confirms what we believe for other reasons and from other sources - then fool ourselves is what we will do. 

If we want The Bible to justify our primary allegiance to a social institution (such as a church or denomination), or a political ideology, or an academic specialism - then that is what we will do. The Bible will be read such as to accomplish this over-arching goal. 

Yet, anyone who fools himself thus, will have to contend with the fact that he is fooling himself. If that is all that is wanted, then he will get what he wants. 

And he will not be guided by The Bible, but instead by the primary allegiance that shapes his reading of The Bible. 

But if you are instead someone who wants to know the truth about reality and to live in accordance with it - then there would be no point in fooling oneself. 

Indeed, the reason for taking personal responsibility is precisely to escape the knowledge that other people are trying to foist their own (often self-interested) Biblical understandings upon us, for their own reasons. 

Perhaps for reasons of what they regard as a better society; or maybe they want to fool us, manipulate us - for their personal benefit. 

There are some matters upon which we do not want to trust anybody else - and this, for me, is one of them. 

This is my life, and I shall be the one to take the consequences of my decisions. Therefore, I will take responsibility for my understanding of Jesus, and for deciding how to read The Bible. 

Why on earth should I want to hand-over such matters to... somebody else, anybody else? 

To a church, or other institutions; to historians and linguists, to past "authorities" (whom I only vaguely know, and at second-hand or worse). 

No: I must myself be satisfied, ultimately. All else is a help, or a hindrance, to that goal.  

**

In particular, I regard it as unacceptable for my faith to be built upon the shifting (and mostly secular) sands of historical/ palaeographic/ linguistic/ cultural scholarship; theology and philosophy or the like. It is vital that I can reach behind such distortions and contingencies, to discover, devise, experience what I need to know - and that I do this ultimately for myself.  

It is my job to seek my salvation, and I read The Bible in that spirit; evaluating and selecting on that basis. 

In practice I have found great help from reading the (King James translation) Fourth Gospel, called "The Book of John" - but it has been a help, a source of ideas, a basis for further consideration - it has not been regarded as something that told me what to believe and do. 

It is not so much a matter of being selective about the IV Gospel; as that there are parts of it that I evaluate as untrue (for whatever reason, and there might be many reasons). 

Furthermore, there are many vital truths (as I regard them) unsaid in this Gospel, or anywhere in The Bible (or, indeed, anywhere in any of the Christian churches that I know of). 

On the other side; as for the rest of The Bible. I have found very little positive in the Old Testament; aside from phrases of wonderfully evocative poetry (in some of The Psalms, for example) and copious accounts of wrong-headed and mistaken things that I ought to avoid.  

In sum; The Bible is not essential to understanding or knowing Jesus - nor to salvation  - nor to living well in this mortal life. 

The Bible is "just" a potential source of information and ideas; that in principle might be found elsewhere or discovered for oneself.  

And the same applies to all other external sources: to the churches, traditions, theories and whatever. These are all sources to be used - not authorities to which it may be expected that I hand over responsibility for my life, my soul, and my eternal future.