God is quite busy
Out of context: Reply #266
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- gramme0
"I guess what I'm asking is, how do you distinguish between the things that are meant "only for the time" and the ones we should follow today? What criteria are you using?
To the casual observer (me), it seems that you are tossing out the ones that are inconvenient because they seem sexist or un-PC, ie, no longer socially acceptable.
You have to admit, there is no indication in the Bible itself that any of these decrees from god are meant this way (have an expiration date on them)."
—One way to distinguish between ideas that were meant for the time of writing only and those that were designed to be carried out by future generations regardless of culture is to consider the context. I know this has been said before here, but one must think about the general gist of a passage, it's overarching theme, patterns of speech, the audience, etc. For example, when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, he was speaking in large part to Jews in Rome who had recently converted to Christianity; thus, he spent a lot of time talking about the covenants and prophecies in the Old Testament—how those covenants and prophecies were fulfilled in Christ.
Due to scholarly diligence, we still have access to old Hebrew (Old Testament) and Hellenic Greek (both the scholarly dialect and the "Koine" or common dialect). With such knowledge we're able to discover that throughout the New Testament, when a writer addresses his audience with "my brothers," he is actually saying in Greek "my brothers and sisters," which in Greek is a single word similar to our "sibling".
Spinning off of that little tangent, another way we can determine what was meant for the current time and what was meant for all time is to understand history. When we know a) who the speaker is, b) who they're speaking to, and c) what the background information is, we can get a much better sense of the intended meaning. This is a daunting task for any layman, but thankfully we have well-trained pastors all over the world (well, some better than others of course) who expound on these very things for our benefit.
- @ ukitdesignbot
- oops :)designbot
- how do you get 'training' for interpreting the bible? seems like a pretty subjectively based occupation.spifflink
- hey spifflink, the same way you would get trained to read any ancient writing. How do you think anyone interprets hieroglyphs for example?designbot
- example?designbot
- Seminary. Teachers there are experts in ancient Greek & Hebrewgramme
- and tend to be brilliant people in general. A decent seminary pushes students very, very hard in their studies.gramme
- what word are you referring to:
in Greek "my brothers and sisters," ?******** - learning a language is applicable to many things. its not 'bible training' its language training.spifflink
- In seminary one learns history, language, apologetics and preaching skills.gramme
- often counseling too.gramme