I just wanted to give Naked Bible Readers a heads up to something that begins today. In an effort to get my thinking and content to a wider audience and prepare uninitiated readers to what they’ll read in The Unseen Realm and Supernatural, I’ll be writing a weekly post for the Logos Academic blog. We’re calling the weekly effort “Unfiltered Fridays.” Have to like that.
The inaugural essay is titled: “Getting Serious—and Being Honest—about Interpreting the Bible in Context.”
The content of the essay will be familiar to Naked Bible veterans, but I hope you’ll give it a read anyway. We’re shooting for posts between 400-1000 words each week.
It seems to me that the primary context for believing Christians is the context of the NT. In other words, did Jesus and the apostles truly understand what the OT was talking about? They spoke hundreds of years later. They seemed to understand that the volume of the scriptures were about Christ (Luke 24:44, John 5:39, Rom 1:2, Heb 10:7) Did they truly understand the context of the OT? Was their teaching present in the early church, and influential to the writings of the early church fathers? Should we see the NT as simply a reinterpretation of the OT in sort of a postmodern sense?
I’d say that the primary context for believing Christians (slightly adjusting your wording) is “the context of the NT as that has been filtered for them.” The NT writers were well tuned to the NT — and their thinking was often informed by 2nd temple Jewish thinking about the OT — which in turn often preserved, in startling ways, the original ANE context of certain OT passages. Genesis 6:1-4 is a classic illustration, as The Unseen Realm will demonstrate. Most of the believing church community today has the NT filtered through their various traditions, which pay little to no attention to 2nd temple contexts or earlier ANE contexts for the OT. Academics of course are all over that stuff (I’m not unique). A major goal of the book is to take what scholars do and make it decipherable to the non-specialist so that readers today get the payoffs. Sometimes that results in just more richness to what folks have already heard in church (like comparing pre-HD TV to HD). At other times the effort will show how certain traditions or cherished interpretations are quite misguided or fall short of clarity in significant ways.
In short, not everything in the Bible is about Jesus. But everything has a role to play in the theological epic of which Jesus is the central figure. A “Christocentric” approach to the entire Bible catches a number of important interpretive fish. But it misses things that are important, and that actually make the fish that are caught more tasty.
A clunky metaphor, but oh well. 🙂
Very nice. I like that title, “Unfiltered Fridays” too.
kind of catchy. Naked Bible was taken! 🙂
Ya had me worried…
“But they are far from the whole counsel of God,”
Totally saved it. Effectively the title and summation.
The final paragraph was a pleasure to read. Nice.
Keep throwing’ heat.
Best.
Loved the last line – I’m a baseball fanatic.
Knew/guessed that from the fantasy bb thing.
Red Sox.Game 6 ’86. Bill Buckner cured me…
Although, I would watch every pitch of every David Ortiz at bat. Nexus ‘o disaster. Heartbreaker.
I love the heart attack kids. To bring up the most recent super bowl…(sorry…).
Malcolm Butler. Smallest man on the field. Undrafted free-agent from Western Alabama (??). 30 sec left. He steps up. Everything changes. Malcolm wins. Everybody else was just along for the ride.
A couple thousand years ago some carpenter’s kid shows up at a wedding in some backwater of the Galilee. Boom. Everything changes. Every. Thing.
A moment when all time and space was stood on its head. Permanently forever.
Nobody (effectively) saw that comin’.
Oh how I love them heart-attack kids.
Best.
The Red Sox *did* forgive Buckner.
Cellar. Painting window sash. Hacked cable into a n old black white tv.
“cured me” of screaming at the tv for some poor guy to drop dead and,at least, keep the ball in the infield. Not proud…
Buckner’s ankles were so bad a normal human being wouldn’t have dressed that day. He did. Played hard. In the bigs. World Series no less. Just another goofy infield play.
Game 7. Anybody’s game. Sox lost.
Always felt Buckner was owed an apology not “forgiveness”.
Best.
Great post! I look forward eagerly to the next installment!
thanks!
Just great – keep them coming
Thanks a bunch.
JZ
Thanks