Beyond The Wall
“When you read the Bible, be careful of adopting a bunch of mechanical rules to read by… You know, you can go to the Christian bookstore, or the seminary bookstore, and you can get books by popular writers and by professors of theology on how to read the Bible: ‘rules for reading.’ And there is much that is useful and good in some or all of those books. But we must ask ourselves, what other book have you ever read using rules? Do you have a book of rules to read the newspaper by? Or if you want to read a novel by Jane Austen, must you consult a book of interpretive laws? Or a textbook on American history? Or do you just read it? It’s kind of odd that we have covered the Bible up with ‘rules on how to read.’ We don’t read anything else by rules. So what’s going on here?
Part of the reason is that over the last several hundred years, western civilisation has been enraptured with what we call the ‘science ideal’: since scientific investigation of the things of the Creation has paid off, therefore we want to imitate the ways of science in our investigation of everything else…
Science investigates things. Things can be categorised. Things can be numbered. Things can be understood in a spatial way by putting them in order and comparing them. And this is right for this area of life. But the scientific method is nothing but idolatry when it’s turned against God and other human beings…”
Further to yesterday’s post, Gregg Strawbridge has very kindly allowed me to upload the second lecture from James Jordan’s series, How To Read The Bible. It is called “Beware of Rules” (Click here to listen). It’s not that there aren’t any hermeneutical rules when it comes to the Bible; it’s that the rules are not the ones made up by Myopic Minimalistic Modern Men. On the surface, this is a fairly lighthearted lecture, but don’t let that fool you. Jordan packs more useful stuff into this 45 minutes than you can use in a lifetime.
You can purchase the series here, or for an even better deal, you can purchase the latest edition of the complete JBJ audio library here.
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In fact, if you are one of the first three readers who can prove to me that you purchased the complete set online today, I’ll send you a free signed copy of Bible Matrix. Sadly, it will only be signed by me, not Dr Leithart.
[ email print @ bullartistry [dot] com [dot] au ]
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