Postmodernism has often gotten a bad rap in Christian circles. But to my mind, it has offered us many wonderful gifts — not the least of which has been the lifting up of voices that have not historically been heard in the Church (at least in the past few hundred years): especially the voices of … Continue reading Big Questions: Whose Text is It?
There’s an old saying in hermeneutics that “A text can’t mean what it never meant.” It’s a warning against truly novel readings of ancient texts; after all, if something has been read for two thousand years, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be the first to ‘crack the code’ ! I say ‘truly novel’ because … Continue reading Big Questions: : What do traditional readings say about the text (and the tradition)?
It’s often said that the Bible is not a book, but a library. As much as we see in it a unified message of God’s love for creation, this message is communicated in a variety of different voices: it’s a complex symphony, not a simple melody. As such, when we read a given passage, we … Continue reading Big Questions: What else do the Scriptures say about this?
In the most recent post in this series on the ‘big questions’ that can help us read the Bible better we looked at the importance of understanding historical and cultural context. Today’s big question is also about the context of a given text, but is about the text in its immediate surroundings: What is the … Continue reading Big Questions: What is the Literary Context?
In the first three posts in this series re-introducing my Integral Hermeneutic method by exploring the ‘big questions’ it’s important for us to ask in our attempt to read the Bible better, we have looked at the questions that fall under the first two steps of that process, Experience and Encounter. Today we’ll move on … Continue reading Big Questions: What is the Historical and Cultural Context?
Matthew Root 