What he says, as he says it

I reckon you need to approach the Bible with a bit of a laid-back attitude if you're to make good sense of what it says. The basic message's simple: Christ died for our sins as the Scriptures said he would, was buried, raised three days later as the Scriptures said he would be, and then he appeared to Peter and the Twelve. Laid-back or uptight, it's pretty clear.

But it's not all like that. God says different things in different places. And you've got to be attentive to genre, and to what's gone before and what's coming just after. There's order and systematisation to the whole thing, but there's also paradox and differing emphases and some things that are too glorious to really understand.

So you need a laid-back attitude and an open mind. You've got to go into the thing prepared to ditch what the good guys have thought for the last however many years. You've got to go: well, that doesn't sit at all comfortably with my culture and I don't see that anywhere around, but, heck, it's there in plain writing, so who am I to disbelieve? But if you go in hard, you'll end up wrangling all sorts of possibilities - it could mean this, it's open to that. But you're picking its bones - you're not honouring the tenor, the substance or the emphasis of what God had penned. You've got to sit back a little and let it say what it has to say. Of course, there's no point being dumb about it - if something's puzzling, if it doesn't add up, you need to think hard. You need to prod and pull and examine. But just don't start off like that - begin sitting back and stay that way until you see that there's something that needs to be checked.

But be careful of being too laid-back, assuming a lazy postmodernism that's open to all options because it can't be bothered seeking the truth. That's just as disrespectful as going in hard.

Humility, that's the key.