I have now added an essay on interpreting wisdom literature to my set of very basic interpretation essays. This essay was already supposed to be there, and had links to it, but it hadn’t been posted. One by one I’m filling the holes in the participatory study method files. I have quite a bit of…
Peter Kirk has an interesting post on Bible Deists, those who believe that God spoke only through the Bible and has basically been out of touch in the intervening time. He quotes extensively from Jack Deere’s Surprised by the Voice of God. Deere makes many of these points. One of the elements I emphasize in…
This is a follow-up to my post Information or Conversation, and it would probably be a good idea to read that entry first. One element of God’s method of revealing himself to people is that he chooses specific people to accomplish specific missions. I want to look at the time of the exile, and three…
I frequently get into discussions about the inspiration of the Bible. These discussions generally center around such texts as 2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 1:20-21, or Hebrews 4:12. Now all of these are good texts from which to study about the nature of scripture, but it interests me that we build theology from these texts…
I’ve been involved in occasional exchanges in another forum on the use of translations in Bible study. This individual seems to think that when he finds a translation that supports a particular point of view, he can just stick with that translation, and nobody should be able to question him. It’s one of the weirdest…
Introduction Genesis 5 continues the priestly account of origins. Now I don’t want us to get the idea that there are two separate messages here, because the two sources (priestly [P] and Yahwist [J]) have been brought together with their own message. Nonetheless, we can get some additional breadth and depth to this message by…
John the Methodist on Locusts and Honey has an excellent post on sexual ethics and the exegesis behind it. He discusses the misuse of the story of David and Bathsheba in order to make a point that was nonetheless a good one. When he encountered this in a small group discussion, John was silent on…
I’m adding a couple of links from Christianity Today to this site, and I want to call particular attention to them. I try to keep the links, especially those near the top, as useful as possible. One of my key suggestions for Bible study is to look at different views in order to fill out…
I often hear 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 applied to the issue of whether one needs to know Greek in order to comment on certain translation issues. It’s difficult to see how anyone could imagine that this passage applies to such a situation. Certainly there are spiritual things which a Christian will understand differently than others, but…
