Wrap-Up

This lesson put a lot of lists and categories in front of you—the kinds of things that will be helpful as resources along the journey. You’re beginning to see just how much a person’s faith is part of an “interpretative community.” 

We share the same Old Testament with Jews, but we view it through a different lens. We also share the same Bible with Christians in other traditions—plus or minus the apocrypha or deutero-canonical books—but we are all members of interpretive communities that have a variety of lenses and filters through which we read that same Bible. 

So, as it turns out, some good lessons in history provide a window into the sectarian religious communities of our own time. They teach us how each prioritizes certain issues and reads the same Bible through many lenses.