Series on Reading the Text(s) of Scripture
This series, done jointly on Everyday Liturgy and Through a Glass Darkly should be well worth your time to follow. I will certainly be following it.
Horrors! A Plague of Bible Reading!
. . . or so I might be led to believe by reading Christians Spend Too Much Time Studying the Bible (HT: JakeBouma.com). I don’t know enough about the pastor who wrote this, so I can’t say whether it provides an appropriate balance for his congregation. Perhaps he is plagued with church members whose noses…
Going Back to the Original
Sinaiticus, a 4th century manuscript of the New Testament and parts of the LXX Old Testament, will go on display, starting this July with some portions, and available completely by next year (MSNBC.com story). The story got me thinking about what it means to go back to “the original.” KJV-Only advocates will tell you how…
No Meaning without Interpretation
You know, that title is so much worse than the one I’m going to link to — The Bible doesn’t say. That makes the point. I frequently say that one can only call something “Biblical” when speaking from within a particular interpretive framework, which completely ruins the whole “Biblical” thing. In my experience the use…
Traveling through to Romans 8:1
So there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. — Romans 8:1 Oh how we long to get to this verse in studying the Bible. If we’re reading through, we may be tempted to rush it. It’s like working forward through a tragic book to the point at which we know…
Studying the Bible for Yourself
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…
Rapture Foolishness
There is nothing that brings out quite so much strangeness as discussion of the end-times. Nonetheless, I consider it fun. It has been commercialized in books, movies, and a video game, and now there is a special web site, You’ve Been Left Behind, which offers to allow you to send e-mails and files to unsaved…
Small Group Error Correction
Last Saturday I attended church with my mother, who is a Seventh-day Adventist. I was visiting for her 90th birthday. During Sabbath School (the SDA version of Sunday School), there were a number of questionable “facts” brought out by various members of the class. Amongst these was “Spare the rod and spoil the child” as…
An Example of Archaic Words – 1 Samuel 9:9
In a comment to a previous post, someone brought up the case of Saul and the seer. In this passage we have the parenthetical note following the reference by one of the characters to a seer, indicating that a prophet was formerly called a seer. This was provided as an example of how to handle…
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Independence and Bible Study
In working on YouTube recently, and particularly on this response to a KJV Only presentation, I’ve noticed that many people think that there is great virtue in independence when it comes to Bible study. Statements like “I didn’t depend on any scholars in coming to this view” or “I didn’t read any commentaries, just the…