I’m working on a long post on 2 Corinthians 5, but in the meantime, try answering some of these questions.
One of the key foundations of my participatory Bible study method is my firm belief that individual Christians can and should study the Bible for themselves. I believe this study will depend on the work of experts in many cases, and that it should be accountable within a church community, but the individual, under the…
Dave Black has been posting some interesting things on his blog, and yesterday he wrote a bit about Greek and Hebrew language and culture. I’ve put this on jesusparadigm.com to provide a permanent link. Here’s the bottom line: The bottom line: I think it’s a bit misleading to insist that grammar and thought are inherently…
An excellent technique for digging deeper into a Bible text is to formulate questions about the text, and then look for answers to those questions. I discuss this briefly in my essay Reading the Text Precisely. A starting point for this is simply to ask basic fact questions about the text. Many difficult and angry…
I haven’t blogged much, recently and I may go back and look at some earlier, lessons, but I wanted to quote something we’ll be looking at in class this morning. This comes from the forthcoming study guide to Philippians by Bruce Epperly. He has just described two groups, the first those identified in 1 Corinthians…
A weakness of a great deal of Bible study is in the failure to truly see the details. In our normal conversations we have multiple contextual clues including shared history and knowledge. When reading scripture, we have to be more careful, because it is not addressed directly to us, and we often don’t share those…
One recommendation I make for Bible study is simple: Look for what speaks to, and yes convicts, you first. It’s very easy to read the Bible and find all the things that other people ought—or ought not—to do. This results in our practice of having lists of “clean” sins and “dirty” sins. Clean sins are…