Every time we read, we want to know what an author intends to see and experience. This belief has enormous implications for why and how we read.
First, it involves courtesy. If you wrote me a letter with instructions on how to get home and I got lost because I put my own creative meanings in your words, instead of trying to get you in your head, it would be disrespectful.
- Courtesy says.
- “Do to the authors what you’d like the authors to do to you.
- “If you put your intentions in a letter.
- Contract or sermon.
- You’ll expect others to try to extract what you put in it.
- The same for authors when we read.
Secondly, it implies humility. When we read that way, we admit that we don’t know things and that others probably know, that’s why we want to learn through reading. Not only do we read to see what we already know, we read to discover a reality outside of ourselves that we don’t yet know.
Of course, there are other goals in reading besides learning, such as the pleasure of a good story or a well-designed poem or essay, but we’ll have to put that aside for now.
Third, reading in search of an author’s intentions implies the objective existence of reality out of my mind. Not only do we read from subjective experiences, we read to learn more about objective reality.
The author is one of those objective realities outside of me, exists and has a glimpse of the reality that I do not have, I want to see what he has seen and prove it and, if it is true, embrace it so that I believe in my knowledge of reality and in my enjoyment of all that is good.
The intention of the author when he wrote is another objective reality. He had an intention when he wrote. Nothing will change that. This is the past event and the goal of the story. An author can change his mind, but he cannot change his past.
I may or may not come to his intention (because I am a weak reader, or because he was a weak writer, or for some other reason), but believing that the author’s intention is there, and worth finding, profoundly affects the way he reads.
When I read a word, what I want to know is “what did the author want with this?”, not only “what ideas come to mind when I say the word?”When I read a sentence, what I want to know is: What did the author mean?No, what new ideas do I have when I read it?How I use it. The meaning of a sentence, word, or document is what the author wanted us to understand about them.
It doesn’t matter if we learn more from an author’s writing than he wanted, and it doesn’t matter if we’re happy to take the words of a poem in a different way than the author wanted, but we’ll still be pygmies in our lives. understanding whether we are not humble, seeking to think of an author’s thoughts after him and to live the emotions he intended for us.
So, then, every time I talk about the meaning of a word, a sentence, a proposal or a document, I mean what the author wanted us to understand, not the ideas we have during reading.
I start here because our minds are usually passive until we have to understand something, or, in other words, we don’t usually think until we face a problem to solve, a mystery to solve or a riddle to decipher.
As long as we do not think about what we read, we will lose some of the meanings of the scriptures. As long as our minds move from passive to active reading, we’ll come up with wonderful ideas.
Paul said to Timothy, “Think of what I have just said, for the Lord will give you intelligence in all things?”(2 Tim 2. 7).
Does this mean that God gives understanding outside of thought?Non. Il said, “Meditate, and God will give understanding? He will give it to us through our reflection.
But most of the time, our mind is passive. They’re not thinking, they’re defating and bending. But once there’s a problem we want to solve or a mystery to discover, we start thinking and our mind is activated.
That is why the habit of asking questions is crucial. And I mean mainly asking questions of ourselves, not of others. Ask others about a short circuit in their thought process. There are times when you have to ask other people, but if you get used to asking yourself questions, you will become one of those people that other people turn to ask questions.
Asking questions is a way to create a problem or mystery to solve, this means that the habit of asking questions awakens and supports our thought process, an incredibly fruitful habit. Incredible things happen when you get into the habit of asking yourself questions while reading.
In other words, I ask questions about definitions, more specifically what the word means here, in this precise sentence (remember, we ask what the author meant by it, not what we think she means).
This assumes that words have different meanings in different sentences. It’s true. They have. For example, the word “life” can mean mortal life or eternal life. What of the author’s intentions was it when he wrote a particular sentence?
By expression, I mean a group of words without a verb describing an action, a person, or a thing. For example, “Man with leprosy” is an expression describing man. Or “Mortify Your Sins by the Spirit”?is an expression that describes the “mortify” action. It tells us how we mortify our sins.
We ask how prayers work because they are not always clear. For example, “continues obedience by faith”. It is a phrase that describes obedience. But how does it work? By faith? It means “obedience consisting of faith” Faith is ordained, so when we have faith, we obey order. So faith is obedience?It means “obedience that flows from faith. ” In this case, faith and obedience are not the same, and faith is the cause of obedience.
A proposal is a group of words that has a verb and a subject and therefore makes some kind of statement or some kind of question. The relationship between proposals is one of the most important questions you can ask yourself, for example, suppose you read these two proposals:
How are they related? We don’t know without a word or a connection expression. Connectors (conjunctions) are words or phrases like: and, but, because, well, then, yes/then, and so on. What if the connector of these two,proposals was?
Develop your salvation with fear and trepidation, so that it may be God who works in you.
What is the relationship between propositions? It might be on purpose: “Develop your salvation with fear and trepidation with the purpose of making God work in you. “Or it could be the result: “Develop your salvation with fear and trepidation with the result that God is the one who works in you. “
But what if the connector were, why, what does Paul really use in Philippians 2:13?
Develop your salvation with fear and tremor; because it is God who works in you.
This would mean that God’s work was the first thing and was the cause of our work. You can teach totally different theologies by changing a connecting word.
We could spend a lot of time on the different ways in which proposals can be linked, but they are summarized in my booklet “Biblical Exegesis”.
There is a hermeneutical circle, but it is not a vicious circle. You cannot know exactly what a proposal means until you know the meaning of the words, and you cannot know precisely the meaning of the words until you know the meaning of the proposal.
Words have a limited range of shared meanings. When we begin to read the words, any erroneous assumptions we make about their meaning are usually corrected at the end of the sentence or by connecting it to other sentences. proposals clarify the meaning of your words:
However, [God] was not allowed to run out of a testimony of himself, doing good, giving you fruitful rains and seasons of heaven (Acts 14. 17)
In general, we know what a “testimony” is, but only when the final proposal is linked to the first, do we know that he?It does not refer to one person, but to rains and fruitful seasons. Here’s a more complex topic example:
We preach christ crucified, scandal to the Jews, madness to the Gentiles; but to the called, Jews and Greeks, we preach christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1,23?24)
Who are the? The word alone could refer to those who hear the word of the cross preached by Paul. Calls all in one way; when he preaches Christ, he does not limit his call to salvation; Call everyone to repentance and faith.
But the way the proposals fit together, the “calls, ” in verse 24, cannot mean that. Those “called,” verse 24 says, receive the word of the cross as “the power of God and the wisdom of God. “We know from verse 23 that many of those who heard the message did not receive it that way; they received it as a scandal and madness.
Therefore, not all callers hear the word. Then, in verse 24, “Call? cannot mean the general call that everyone receives through the sermon. It should refer to a call from God that only gives to a few. And it must be of particular effectiveness, for all who receive it see the cross as power and wisdom. That’s why theologians call it an effective vocation.
Thus, even if the words themselves have different meanings, the content and relationships of the proposals around them generally clarify the specific meaning that the author intended to give them.
One of my most fruitful habits when asking questions is to wonder how the meaning or apparent point of a passage fits into other passages that seem contradictory or inconsistent.
I never assume that the Bible is inconsistent, but that I don’t see everything I need to see, so this habit is so beneficial. If I haven’t seen enough to explain the apparent inconsistency, it’s likely that asking how the texts fit together will help me see more.
And seeing more is what we’re looking for. We want to see as much as there really is. Here is an example of this kind of questioning. In Romans 5. 8, Paul says:
God shows his love for us for the fact that Christ died for us when we were still sinners.
But Psalm 11. 5 says
The Lord experiences the righteous and the wicked; but if he loves violence, his soul hates him.
Then God loves us while we are sinners and God hates the bad guys. When we see this tension between God’s love for sinners and hatred for sinners, we must begin to think about the possible ways in which these two truths fit together, which means that we have begun to ask more questions.
These kinds of questions appear in the mind when two passages come together in tension with each other, to discover how they articulate, it is amazing to see everything we learn from this habit of asking questions about apparent difficulties. make a person deeper and richer in his knowledge of God and his ways than the habit of wondering how texts are coherent in reality when, at first, they do not seem so.
The purpose of the biblical writers is not just to know things, but to know things. Therefore, part of our response to Scripture is to get into the habit of asking questions about the application – to ourselves and our church, to other Christians and our relationships, and to the world, unbelievers and institutions.
This means that the application task never completes. There are millions of ways to apply text to millions of situations and relationships. Our task is not to know all these applications, but to grow by applying the meaning of the scriptures to the lives, people and institutions around us.
The questions about the application are not primarily a search for meaning (the author’s intention), but the difference that meaning will make in our lives, but the fact is that asking about the application often highlights elements of the text that you do not have. viewed.
For example, it is very likely that until a church actually tries to apply the passages on church discipline, it will not read them carefully enough to see what it says specifically. Each new effort to follow the processes will send you back to the Bible to see what else there is.
For example, until I tried to apply the teaching of Matthew 18, 15-18, I had not realized that there might be some time between taking two or three witnesses to confront a brother who did not repent and the next step, to take his case to the end. But when the application forced us to ask ourselves this question, we actually saw that there is nothing in the sense of the text to suggest that the next step is immediate. This raised the question of how we should have sex with the person. during this period, and we had more work to do in the search for the scriptures.
This is not uncommon. Efforts to apply the meaning of a text often help us ask questions about the text that reveal things we haven’t seen. Therefore, although our goal is to find the meaning of a passage and then apply it, it is also true that the application of meaning itself often raises questions that further clarify the meaning.
The purpose of reading the Bible is not only to know, but also to believe, to wait, and to love. The full range of human emotions are possible reactions to the meaning of the Bible. Did God give us the Bible not only to inform our minds, but also to transform our hearts, our affections. There is always a more or less appropriate way for our feelings to move by the truth we see.
For example, a horrible truth should not have the same emotional effect as a beautiful truth. God’s unattainable holiness should not produce the same emotion as the tender closeness to God. Jesus’ rebuke should not produce the same emotion as Jesus’ praise.
So part of the answer to the scriptures is to ask the question, what is an appropriate emotional response to the meaning of this text?Do I feel that way?
The word of God is honored not only when it is properly understood, but also when it feels correctly. An empty-hearted response to a glorious truth is a flawed response to the Bible. Therefore, we continue to ask questions until we have asked what emotions are appropriate in response to the meaning of the Bible and whether we feel those emotions.
God wrote a book and the pages of that book are filled with its glory. But we cannot perceive this glorious beauty through our human eyes, by our own efforts.
In this book, John Piper shows us that in the simple reading of the Bible something miraculous can happen: we gain eyes that can contemplate the glory of the living and true God.
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