Four
challenges for Bible interpretation are listed in your text—the distance of
time, cultural distance, geographical distance, and distance of language. Offer
an argument for which challenge is the easiest to overcome and which is the
most difficult. Be sure to define the challenge and to identify clearly the
problems inherent in it.
This is not any easy topic to approach. Each one of the
distances offers its own unique challenges. If I had the option I would group
two of them together and make it one, which are the distances, geographical and
cultural distance.
As I
compare what these differences are not one jumps out as the forerunner as the
hardest bridge to cross. In having to choose one as the easiest to get past
would be time. Now hear me out before you start saying to yourself “Paul your
crazy, time is one of the harder ones to settle up with.” The reason I chose
time is when you think about it even the readers of the OT had to deal with the
challenge of time when they were reading. According to Klein, “Another time span that must be considered in
interpreting the Bible involves the gaps that existed—more or less in various
places—between the time the Bible events occurred and the time when those
events were actually written down in the texts we now possess.”[1]Since
we now understand that time has been an issue for all generations of Bible
readers we can see that we are not unique. When dealing with the issue of time should
it change how we read the Bible? The answer to that question is yes and no. We
should try and understand where the original author is writing from and who he
is writing to, but it should make us appreciate the Word that much more.
The
difference I think is the hardest for us to deal with is the distance of
culture, while I want to say language I think we have some extremely talented
men and women who have been blessed with the ability to translate. However,
what does not always translate is culture. We live in a world where there is
technology coming out of the wah-zoo, most of us are not living how people
lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. This offers us a very difficult
bridge to cross seeing that, “The biblical world was essentially agrarian, made
up of land owners and tenant farmers using machinery that was primitive by our
standards and methods of travel that were slow and weary.”[2]
When you think of an Inn you probably
first off think of some nice hotel with a row of rooms with nice comfortable
beds with cushy pillows. Most inns were primitive
shelters for people and their animals. Also, as Klein points out, “…in the West
individualism is so pervades our thinking that even in the Church we encounter
interpretations that focus on individuals and never think about testing whether
the text may actually have more corporate intentions.”[3]
Once we can begin to learn more about the culture the Bible takes place in we
can begin grasping the deeper meaning behind the words and they will no longer
just be words on a page but they will come to life.
Bibliography
Duvall, J.
Scott, and J. Daniel Hays. Grasping God's Word 2nd edition. Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2005.
Fee, Gordon
D., and Douglas Stuart. How to Read the Bible for All its Worth. Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.
Klien,
WIlliam W., and Craig L. and Robert L. Hubbard Jr. Blomberg. Introduction
to Biblical Interpretatioin. Nahsville: Thomas Nelson, 2004.
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