I'm reading a book called "How to read the bible for all its worth" right now. It's very clearly slanted to the calvinistic/pre-millenial view of the bible, but it has some very interesting principles. Primarily, it emphasizes looking at two areas in any bible study: exegesis & hermeneutics. This boils down to looking at the history, cultural context and message to the original audience and then looking at what messages/lessons/commands we can apply today. I've been moving in this direction in my personal study in the last year or so while not realizing how exactly to express the thought. One other benefit of the text is that they offer their outlines of some books or chapters that have let me look at things from a slightly different perspective.
The other interesting feature of this book is that it looks at how to study the different types of writing in the bible - epistles, narrative (though I think they omit the "historical" intentionally, and to their detriment), Acts (they regard as a special narrative), the gospels, etc... (the gospels chapter is where I am right now).
Overall, I think this might be worth purchasing (i currently have it from the library), if for no other reason than to read some of the scriptural arguments that a calvinist might use to defend their loose interpretation of scripture.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
How to Read the Bible is a thought-provoking book. I enjoyed your review. I do think, however, that one shouldn't downplay the importance of genre (epistle, narrative, poetry, etc.) when reading the Scriptures. We have gotten ourselves into far too much trouble in the church by ignoring the literary context of the Bible. Thus, we end up reading epistles like books of law -- 1 Corinthians, Ephesians or James become Leviticus and we search them for definitive case-law rulings on every little issue -- ignoring the fact that, with the epistles in particular, what we have are occasional documents written to address specific, time-bound issues.
ReplyDelete