I’ve been preaching and teaching from Romans for the last month or so. Tonight I’m doing a class on Romans 7. Yikes!!! There are tons of possible intepretations for this text. I like almost all of them. Some because they seem to jive with what the text is saying. Others because they resonate so powerfully with my own Christian experience. I love the tension. To what extent do we allow our experience to shape our interpretation of the text? To what extent did the experience of those writing the text shape the text we are now reading and intepreting? Is their experience more valid that ours? When people from different backgrounds with different experiences come to the text and experience it differently is that a bad thing? Is it possible that the Holy Spirit can take a text written long ago and give it new meaning for those of us living in a different zip code from the original, intended audience?
