Lenses We Bring to Scripture

I think that transforming Christianity requires a continued search for new lenses and voices engaging with the text.  Being aware of our own cultural and contextual influences is important to this process and can help us to uncover when our vision may be limited, but we can never fully remove our own predispositions and biases.  Engaging alternative and varied voices therefore changes our own lives, perspectives, and helps us understand ourselves better, in turn bringing this varied perspective not only directly but indirectly to our interpretive work.  

If our work as theologians is, in many ways, counter-systematic work of resisting cultural normativity in search of the interstices where divinity lives (which I think it is), then we should also seek lenses of resistance by asking where resistance is in our time and place (and others) to ask how their lenses might inform our search and how that search might help us to embolden active resistance in the world.