Respect the Author - new post at Out of the Ordinary

It's my turn at Out of the Ordinary today:

I don't know about you, but for most of my life, I approached the Bible with wrong questions and wrong assumptions. My favorite method was this - read a passage which fits my current situation "perfectly", aided by the sacred shoe horn of allegorical interpretation, and then assume the outcome of the text is going to be paralleled in my life. But God did not ordain Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem with me in mind. Or the story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel. Or countless other narratives where I squeezed myself into the text like the step-sisters' feet into the glass slipper. I can laugh at myself in hindsight, but I completely misunderstood the point of the text. Rather than God being the central theme, I became the star of the show.

I was missing something in my interpretation of the Bible. I was missing the concept of authorial intent.

Read more here.