A Fresh Perspective

I've now had two days of my course on 1 Corinthians. The professor is a serious academician. He's not very funny or particularly dynamic, but he is clearly extremely knowledgeable about the material. And he certainly is not bad to listen to at all. I've learned a few things so far that apply to Bible reading in general.

One is that there are 3 levels of information presentation in the Bible. One is direct, such as the Ten Commandments (though the Sabbath is a bit fuzzy for us as New Covenant Saints). The next is implied, such as the Trinity. Finally, there is the area of creative constructs such as the argument between Calvinism and Arminianism. Unfortunately, we get into problems when we confuse the latter with direct commands. This is where all kinds of divisions start and we get ourselves into trouble with direct commands to have unity in the Spirit.

I've also learned quite a bit about hermeneutics. I always knew that you should take every book in the context of the audience. I always knew that you should inspect the type of writing (epistle, law, poetry, history, prophecy). But I don't think I ever really got my arms around what that means. I don't claim to have that now, but I do know that I know much less about the Bible than I thought I did.

I'm pretty excited to see what I will learn in this course. I'm not so excited about the schedule though. I'm going to be slammed all weekend with things to do. We are supposed to compare our paragraph summaries with scholarly commentaries, but it's hard to see how we will be able to get that done by Monday unless we get access to the library at a time when it's usually not open. It's pretty easy to get stressed now. Stupid work wasting my time...