A few months back I offered the first in what was to be a series of blogs on reading the bible, bouncing off an approach outlined by Richard Hays. Hays suggested that interpretation is a fourfold task: Descriptive: what a particular book of the bible meant to its original audience; Synthesis: how the ideas, themes, injunctions of each book/text fit within the bible as a whole; Hermeneutics: how...
For much of the history of the church the practise of slavery went unchallenged. It’s not difficult to see why. Slavery was a longstanding feature of human society that was rarely questioned by those who were free. In the sixth century BC the philosopher Aristotle argued that slavery was a dictate of nature, that some human beings were by nature given to be ruled while others were by nature given...
I was revisiting Richard Hays’s The Moral Vision of the New Testament recently and was reminded of his very helpful description of how we can discern God’s word to us through the Scriptures. He speaks of a fourfold task: Descriptive Task: Reading the Text Carefully. This seeks to identify the messages of the various texts/books of the Bible “without...