Welcome to Day 1564 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomBible Study – Total Objectivity And The Weird – 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’s 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 – Total Objectivity And The Weird· Insight Fifty-Five: Total Objectivity in Bible Interpretation Is a Myth
Everybody likes to think they’re objective. We all want to believe we can render opinions or judgments wholly divorced from any external influence or personal bias. We don’t like the suspicion that we’ve 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’s a delusion.
Absolute objectivity about anything we enjoy thinking about or are forced to consider is an impossible standard. We can’t 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’re thinking about something or someone with which we have no prior experience, we have our own presuppositions. We weren’t born with those. They are the cumulative result of all our life experiences, primarily how we were raised as children.
Scholars aren’t 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 “real” 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 “confessional” 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 “believe” something only because the thought was handed down to them. Being upfront with that possibility and letting people know we’re trying hard not to filter the Bible through our beliefs fosters accountability. We shouldn’t pretend we are immune from the experience we’ve acquired through past study or our interaction with others interested in the Bible. That’s a façade.
· Insight Fifty-Six: If It’s Weird, It’s...