Reading the Bible is one of the core things that we do as followers of Jesus. Noticing God in Scripture is one of the twelve commitments of A Methodist Way of Life: a way we respond to the gospel of God’s love in Christ and live out our discipleship in worship and mission.

The Bible is beautiful: it contains wisdom, humour, great stories and deep comfort. But it is a strange book, and not necessarily easy to use. This is the reality of dealing with such a set of ancient texts, but sometimes it feels like we must be doing something wrong.

Part of the challenge is that the Bible is full of paradoxes. It doesn’t always make sense in a simple way. Different aspects of it can seem contradictory, and yet true. For example, we believe that the Bible is true, but in different places it makes different claims about who God is and how God acts and what it looks like to be part of God’s family.

This sort of paradox can give us what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: that unpleasant feeling when we believe seemingly mutually incompatible things. People naturally want to reduce this discomfort. One way is to oversimplify and ignore one side and push into the other: ‘the Bible never contradicts itself’ or, ‘the Bible can’t be true’. Another strategy is to avoid it altogether. Either way, our understanding and appreciation of God can suffer.

This course aims to explore six of these paradoxes. It aims to encourage us to keep reading the Bible, and to resist the temptation to jump to one pole of the paradox or the other. Good news can appear when we embrace the mystery and give it space to breathe.