Hi everyone!
I've been a nominal Christian for a while, I've read the Bible and I know a fair amount about a number of denominations. Despite all that, of course, I am still a beginner since I only recently made the decision after years of soul-searching to actually try to live as a Christian.
I know that studying the Bible will be a life-long pursuit, but right now I don't know where to begin since I know that prayerfully studying the Bible is very different from just passively reading it.
I was going to buy a Study Bible to help me, but I realized that all of the Study Bibles I saw were each coming from their own denominational perspective. For example, the ESV Study Bible seems to be Calvinist.
I know that I intend to follow Christ as a Bible-believing Christian and I know that I have to study the Bible from those wiser than myself in order to do that. But I have no idea what resources to get in order to be able to do that. I have no idea what, if any, denomination I may end up in. So how do I proceed to acquire good study materials?
It's going to be impossible to find study materials that aren't influenced and colored by the beliefs of those who wrote/compiled/edited them. We all come to the Bible with our own thoughts, ideas, prejudices, and notions, our own biases; and so nobody is a blank slate when they approach the Bible, whether as someone raised in the faith their whole life, or a brand new convert.
You will probably get a lot of answers telling you to avoid any study materials and just "go with the Bible alone in prayer, asking God to help you understand it"; and that's going to sound like a really nice spiritual-sounding piece of advice. Except, keep in mind, that everyone who gives that kind of advice, if you sat them down in a room and had a conversation with them about different matters of doctrine, practice, and biblical interpretation all those people who say one should just read the Bible and pray, and that God will give you an answer, all have very different opinions, views, and ideas. In a lot of cases they will have wildly different views from one another than, say, the different perspectives you might find reading different sorts of study materials. Because nobody is infallible, and no where are we given a promise that God will just upload The Truth into our heads if we just pray really, really, really hard.
I'm also not going to try and tell you what church/denomination you should ultimately be part of, because while I certainly have my own views--and biases which might be obvious--I honestly think this is something that deserves serious study, thought, and investigation.
Instead I'll encourage you to be willing to ask yourself big questions, and be willing to challenge your own preconceptions.
I can also tell you a little about my own life experiences in trying to figure out the being a Christian thing. I grew up in the faith, in a non-denominational and later Pentecostal environment (and here I'm not going to bash or criticize either). By my late teenage years/early adulthood I had began asking questions, the sorts of questions that eventually led me to a lot of reading and discussion with many different Christians from across denominational backgrounds. I became very interested in the history of Christianity, and so I pored over history books on the subject, as well as read a lot about what different groups believed, theology in general, and of course, a
lot of Bible study. If one is interested in the topic of Christian history, the main three books I always recommend are
Church History in Plain Language by Dr. Bruce Shelley,
The Story of Christianity by Justo L. Gonzalez, and
The Orthodox Church by Timothy Kallistos Ware; the first two are very good, but there is a tendency among western Christian historians to easily gloss over the history of eastern Christianity, that's where Ware's book is so helpful.
It might seem strange to recommend history books in this topic, but history is vitally important to understanding the shape of Christianity as it is today--with all the different denominations and different theological positions held by those denominations.
On the other hand, if that might be a bit too much right now (and I can definitely understand how it might be), honestly just read what you can, ask questions, visit different churches and if you can try to find time to meet with the pastor/priest of the church and just sit down with them. If you are looking for somewhere to begin, you mentioned that you were a nominal Christian for most of your life, but I suspect your family attended a church, start there. If you grew up nominally Methodist, check out a local Methodist church, if you grew up Baptist, check out a local Baptist church, if you grew up Catholic, check out a local Catholic church--and go from there. Start with what is most familiar, and see where it takes you.
-CryptoLutheran
