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“Ask a chatbot about a disputed Bible verse and you may get a tidy answer. Ask America’s pastors about the AI response, and you get a warning: That tidy answer could be a real problem.” - The Baptist Paper
More Than Doing: Categories for Applying God’s Word
Read Part 2.
What Am I Supposed to Do with This?
“Why is our time in God’s Word not as life-transformative as it should be?”
A Word About Proof-Texts
When one is associating a belief with the text of Scripture it is never wise to choose texts from obscure, debated or overly figurative portions of the Bible. Why go to a vision of Zechariah when you can go to an epistle of Paul for the same doctrine?
When tying a doctrine concerning the Church to Scripture we find good men like F. Turretin running to the song of Solomon. Surely it is unwise to appeal to the Song of Solomon, since the assumption that the Song is actually speaking about the Church is a decided long shot.
Interpretation: Step 2 in Bible Study
Read Part 1.
Interpretation is the process of understanding 1) what a Biblical text means and 2) how the text was meant to be applied. Once you have gathered the necessary information to discover what a passage is saying, you can then begin to understand its meaning through careful study of the book’s historical context, literary context, and actual content.
Pastor, Are You Making These Common Lexical Mistakes?
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“words in isolation communicate a general broad concept (a semantic range)…. But when that word is placed in a context—voila!—that broad concept suddenly has been narrowed down by the context into a specific meaning that can be translated with a gloss.” - Word by Word
“Proverbs is a collection of wisdom, not a collection of guarantees.”
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“Proverbs does not offer us formulas that always work in every situation, but rather wise principles that are worthy of our contemplation and discerning implementation.” - Ligonier
Does “All” Always Mean “Every Single One” in the Bible? (Romans 11:26)
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“I carefully began looking up every appearance of ‘all’ in Romans. Guess what? ‘All’ (unsurprisingly) often refers to every single one in Paul’s letter to the Romans, but sometimes it doesn’t.” - Kenneth Berding
Do Bible Readers Make Meaning?
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“Throughout most of history, people have considered the author to be the locus of meaning…. But in recent decades the discussion has progressed beyond the exclusion of the author—and even beyond the exclusive focus upon the text itself.” - Kenneth Berding
Does YHWH have a secret meaning?
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“God is not pleased by the herculean efforts some people go to look so hard for hidden meanings—whether linguistic or allegorical or what have you—that they miss the simple point of what he said.” - Mark Ward
“That’s just your interpretation”
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“I tried to show him that Jesus taught as if there was a discernible meaning in Scripture that could be known, agreed upon, and meaningfully communicated. He replied that this was only my interpretation.” - DeYoung
