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Not Worth Following

My wife Hannah and I are differentiated by a few guiding paradigms, which I call our Great Divides. They are unshared goals or values that often, if not always, come into conflict with one another. So far we have discovered two pairs of dueling desires (I suspect there are more to come), but the Divide featured in this story is Adventure vs. Comfort.  My desire for and attraction to adventure interrupts Hannah’s pursuit of comfort daily but never is it more prominent than when we are deciding what to do in our free time. So, naturally, they are almost always jockeying for position when we are on vacation, and our recent road trip to Oregon was no exception. We were staying with good friends of ours in Roseburg. As they were planning to leave for their own vacation on a Thursday morning, Hannah and I decided to camp in the nearby Umpqua National Forest for the remaining two nights of our excursion.  Our Thursday night campsite was located on Highway 138, the main drag through t...
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Hermeneutics Final Paper

 Here is a copy of the final paper I wrote for my Hermeneutics course. It was originally footnoted, but that doesn't translate to the blog. The prompt asked the student briefly address the source and purpose of language, basic principles for interpretation, and the role of the Holy Spirit in interpretation. Enjoy!       There is a strange intruder dwelling within the human heart which one sage called “eternity” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). While most of us can agree that there is something “out there,” it is rather more complicated to agree on what exactly it is and what precisely it has to do with us. The Christian solution to this problem has historically been the belief that the Bible is the descriptive and prescriptive message of the One True God to all humanity.  In light of this text-centered solution, the field of hermeneutics takes on special importance for the Church. A textually-directed community is a hermeneutically-designed community. Therefore, we employ a...
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Bible Study- Literary Context and Cross-Referencing

 It's been a while since I added to the Bible Study series, so you might want to go back and review. Then again, you might not. Your call. So far we have had a laser focus on the selected text we are studying. Don't leave it. Stay in it. Let it speak. Today I want to talk about best practices for starting to move outside the text. The two things we are going to talk about are literary context and cross-referencing.  Literary Context The literary context is the literature in which the text is embedded. Unless your text is one entire book of the Bible (I suppose this is possible) it has a literary context. Outside of what your passage actually says, the material surrounding it has the greatest bearing on the meaning. The reason it is so vital is that the ideas your text is communicating are only a part of the big ideas that the whole piece of literature is trying to communicate. Imagine you are examining a staircase in a house. Without looking at anything other than the staircas...
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Get Wisdom

 My parents especially appreciate the book of Proverbs; they always have. Needless to say, their special appreciation for the wisdom found there produced a special emphasis in their parenting. Things like common sense, hard work, frugality, and choosing good friends were discussed and reinforced often. I look back on this emphasis with gratitude and love, seeing that many of those ideas became values, and those values combined to form significant and positive aspects of my lifestyle.  That being said, anything my parents pushed me toward, I was prone to avoid when I got the chance. This has (unfortunately) applied to the book of Proverbs, which I have avoided so far in my short adult life. That is, until this last week.  Mom and Dad, you were right. Proverbs is worth my time. I've been specifically impacted by the repetitive emphasis on the wisdom of silence.  All of you know me. All of you know that I love to talk, especially if I think I hold some kind of valuable ...
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Bible Study- Reading Strategies

 If you read the last post in this series, hopefully you are committed to dwelling in the selected text in order to hear what it has to say. This post will give you some techniques and strategies for that process. Here we go! 1. Read aloud/ use an audio Bible.  When the Bible was written, nobody could afford to have a copy of it. Books were extremely expensive because everything had to be hand copied. Therefore, the Scriptures were written to be heard in a public reading rather than read silently. The Bible is for our ears. That means that when we only read it silently, we are likely to miss some of what is there. Luckily for us, there are tons of great audio Bible resources out there to listen to (I use an app called Dwell. It requires a paid subscription, but it has a ton of useful features that free resources don't have, and paying the subscription motivates me to use it), and most of us are able to read aloud. I find that hearing the passage helps me notice repetition, emp...
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Bible Study- Don't Leave the Text

 Welcome to my new "Bible Study" series! "Bible Study" will be a collection of miscellaneous principles and tips that I find are often overlooked or contradicted in most personal or group study. I'll try to keep the posts short and not bite off more than you can chew and digest.  They will build off of one another, so it'd be best to read them in order.  Principle #1- Be slow to leave the text you are studying.  Each text of Scripture has its own thing to say that is slightly (or majorly) different than any other text. In composing his perfect word to humanity, God did not waste words. There is no true redundancy. There is no simple repetition. Therefore, our task in studying a text in the Bible is to understand what THAT TEXT is communicating in itself. We are not trying to understand what the Bible says about the topic that text deals with (that would be theologizing from a text rather than studying the text itself), because in doing so we gloss over the r...
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Book Review: "Portrait of Calvin" by T.H.L. Parker

 I plan to write and post short reviews as a way of condensing my thoughts about the books I read. These will in no way be exhaustive, but I do hope that they might give you good ideas as to the next cover you'll crack open to explore.  T.H.L. Parker published his Portrait of Calvin in 1954 to provide those interested in John Calvin with something different than the many excellent biographies chronicling his life and work. As he presents it, this work is to a biography what a watercolor painting is to a photograph. Though it captures the same scene, it does so with a different intention. It was obvious to me as I read that Parker truly knows Calvin. He has done more than read Calvin. He has spent time with the man behind the volumes, pondered his motives and meditated on the workings of his soul. This kind of care combined with years of careful scholarship has produced an account well worth reading to more than just Calvinists. As I took in the Portrait,  several features...
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