Hey fellas,
I was just wondering what you guys have been reading now that we can exercise our free wills in the area of book choices. I have been reading some Sherlock Holmes mysteries and find him to be quite modern! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is only ever interested in the facts, as is his main character. The stories begin and end with little attention to the human elements that are actually carrying the story along. But hey, it's still interesting and helps teach me how to do principles of Bible study since we are only ever inductive observers of the text, right?
Actually, I have been talking with my Dad about "inductive Bible study" and I don't think it's the all-encompassing rule of interpretation that I remember learning. Essentially (to borrow from Shu), it seems that we use inductive and deductive principles in complementary ways. For instance, I heard a man teaching on the "inductive method" (sounds rather Modern anyway, doesn't it?) and in the same session he encouraged reading Matthew with the theme of "King" in mind. Bringing a "king and kingdom" theme to Matthew is the practice of deductive interpretation. In other words, since I believe Matthew is proving Christ's kingship to the Jews, I see Christ's kingship being proved thoroughly in Matthew. Is this valid?
Two quick thoughts and then I leave it to discussion. First, many of our deductive ideas are derived inductively. In other words, we see many places and ways that Matthew proves Christ's kingship, and thus start looking deeper to see if it might be in places we may not have realized before. So deductive principles can come from inductive "research."
Secondly, some deductive maxims arise directly from Scripture. A clear example is John 20:31 where he tells us the purpose of his book. We thus have warrant to read the rest of the Gospel of John with this theme in mind and find it to be a true insight.
A final remark for our surmising is this: when it comes to Gospel-centered hermeneutics (from Cruver's Principle's class), does Luke 24 and other such passages give us warrant to read Scripture with the "historical-redemptive" deductive principle in mind?
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Thank you for your post Josh; it's good to hear from you. I have actually been thinking about this same thing as I have started reading Goldworthy's Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture. It is an incredible book because he skillfully balances philosophy, theology, and pastoral concern for preaching the gospel as the way of change in the Christian life. YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK! It would be good for us as graduates freshly frustrated by McDillian methodology. He blows McDill out of the water just by how deep he goes, but also by his use of Scripture. His three primary arguments for preaching that testifies of Christ are: 1. Jesus claims to be the subject of all Scripture, 2. The overall structure of Biblical revelation finds its coherance only in the person and work of Christ, 3. The title "Word of God" belongs to the Bible and to Jesus. He has many other arguments and explainations, the most interesting is the third, aboiut Jesus as the Word of God. If this isn't deductive Bible study, I don't know what would be! Everybody has some sort of paradigm for Scripture or a book. I would hope that we would be wise to pick one that is logical, coherant, and God glorifying.
Related to this is the idea that some verses in a book or Scripture as a whole are paradigm setting, like the one you mentioned, John 20:31. For the gospel-centered hermeneutic, verses like Luke 24:44and Romans 1:16-17 would set a paradigm through which Scripture would be viewed.
On a more personal level, I have been struck by the importance of gospel-centrality in the church as I have attended the college and career class as Emily's church. Moralizing the Sermon on the Mount is the order of the day: we need to be perfect, just as the Father is perfect. I left depressed. A verse like Matt. 5:17 would set a paradigm to view the Sermon on the Mount (I have come to fulfill the Law!). If the gospel is the power for salvation, we must have it in our preaching or people will not grow in to conformity to Christ! If we have law we breed legalistic and or depressed Christians. The new pastor that Emily's church has is very good for the church. He is not exactly exegetical, but he knows what is important from a text and preaches that passionately. He stresses God's work in salvation and our reliance on the Spirit and the importance of thinking about Christ.
I finished the Best Things in Life by Kreeft. It was a fun book to read. He has some great arguments against everything modernity and postmodernity stands for. One thing that stood out to me was that we don't exist to conform reality (the material universe for the modernist) to ourselves but we exist to conform ouselves to the good. For the Christian this would be God. Anyway, I am going to go for now. Nice to type.
Josh,
Great thoughts, and you too colbs. Something to think about, though, from the other side of things. Deductive Bible study can be extremely dangerous when something like a man-centered approach to scripture is read back into the text.
Last night, for instance, at church here one of the pastoral staff spoke on Col. 3:1-17. Colossians is replete with "in Him" "by Him" references--in a word, the book is about Christ. As you know chapters 1 & 2 speak of who Christ is, what He did, and who we are in Him. What this gentleman did last night was to skip over the greater context and focus on what man needed to do.
The key to the commands in verses 3 & 4 is that we are hid with Christ and that He IS our life. Sadly though, only a nebulous explanation was given of those verses and the message was focused on my doing those commands seen in in 5-17 in the coming new year.
All this to say, I heartily agree that any principles we would read back into scripture MUST proceed first from adequate inductive study...not from what we have heard our whole life or been taught at school.
On Colby:
Yes, I agree that we need to have a coherent over-arching Biblical message. For Ryrie, that is the "glory of God" through the various dispensations. For people like Doc and Piper and Cruver it would seem to be the "glory of God" through the metanarrative of the Gospel (God's work to redeem mankind through history). One of the important issues I retained from our worship class is that God displays his glory through the Gospel. The Gospel obviously being wrapped in Christ's redemptive work would of necessity relate all other parts of Scripture to Himself. The implications of this would mean that unless we relate the other "dispensations," "covenants," "genres" or "ages" to Christ that we are not correctly preaching that text. Or in other words, we preach part of the Gospel, but not the whole, if we focus merely on Law or Wisdom or Sin or Grace or Works (responsibility). Our responsibility is to communicate the unity and dependence of the Gospel on the person and work of Christ - past, present and future.
On Jared:
You raise the issue that makes me nervous about deductive reasoning or Bible study in general. Deductive reasoning because we have to have well established and Biblical principles from which to deduce lest we preach what we want and focus on man rather than God. About Bible study in general because I think I have seen people "inductively" study Scripture to grievous error. It is the inductive method that gives rise (or at least a defense) of the Roman Catholic position on the Mass (John 6) and Baptism from your very own passage in 1 Peter (which you so wonderfully explained).
I think we are chasing the right issues and coming up with some good thoughts so far.
Happy New Year! Good thoughts guys. Jared's post reminded me of a New Year's Eve sermon my dad preached, probably the best one I have heard: Not I will, but I repent. The sermon I heard on Sunday was good for the new year: have a spiritually prosperous new year by growing in understanding the expanse of God's love (Eph 3).
Also,
Yesterday I played basketball without a shirt on and worked on my tan...I hope you guys are freezing where you are. Happy new year!
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