How do we read the Bible?

I think the three tools I bring to Scripture most prominently are life stories, current events, and questioning/criticism.  

I bring my life stories and my world to meet the text in what is most often a search for comfort.  I ask how the dominant stories in my life and formation play with (by parallel or contrast) the text.  This can be transformative when the comfort I find resists ways that we are taught to resist love in our lives.  When I consider current events, I look for both comfort and discomfort/challenge.  I try to ask how the "now" meets the stories in the text and how the text might have something to say about our now.  

The third piece is informed by much of my academic career and is the piece that is transformative for me, probably because, as Rowan Williams suggests, transformation happens when our interpretations are least palatable.  I try to bring historical criticism to the text and also ask how what we can glean about a historical context might mean about the ways that our characters or stories were subversive and counter-cultural in their time and how those lessons might be extrapolated.  I try to ask the ways that God might be speaking to or through the characters.  I also try to look for the dangerous places in the text-- the meanings I want to resist and be clear I resist when talking about the text.  I want to try to look for how meanings might be read by people at different margins as well as those squarely in the center.  This involves looking for who has power and lacks it in the text (and why), how this power is wielded, distributed, reinforced, and resisted.  How do gender, color, class, and sexuality play out in the story-- how do roles conform or subvert?  Who is given voice?  In order to make sure I am being effective, I look for ways that I might be reinforcing systems, stereotypes, or harmful ideologies.