What's the best approach to understanding scripture: step logic or block logic?

[joanne guarnieri]

I'm reading Rejesus right now, by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. In chapter six they bring up something I've never heard before. "Much of what gets in the way of a true and life-altering encounter with Jesus can be traced to the problem of worldview...

"The Western church is largely influenced by the more speculative and philosophical worldview ushered in by the Hellenistic world. The problem is that our Scriptures are formed by a significantly different way of seeing things -- the Hebraic...

"To try to get to the essential difference between Hellenistic and Hebraic worldview, some writers have called Greek thinking step logic and Hebraic thinking block logic...

"Step logic: tightly contained; argue from premise to conclusion; each step in the process is linked tightly to the next in a coherent, rational, linear fashion. The conclusion, however, was usually limited to one point of view -- the human being's perception of reality...

"Block logic: express concepts in self-contained units, or blocks, of thought. The blocks did not necessarily fit together in an obviously linear or harmonious pattern, particularly when one block represented a human perspective on truth and another on the divine. This way of thinking created a propensity for paradox, antinomy, or apparent contradiction, as on block stood in tension -- and often illogical relation -- to the other. Hence, polarity of thought or dialectic often characterized block thinking."

I've been thinking and thinking about this. What do you all think?

[Char]

I understand that philosophy is not to replace revelation (reason is the devil's greatest whore and all), however this case appears far too overstated to be useful. For example I think errors in thought go to the fact that we are fallen, not in that we are philosophers.

And as I said these are different ways of looking at things, they are not antithetical and to be pitted against one another. A logical person is just as capable of understanding the scriptures as an intuitive one, because it is the Holy Spirit that gives illumination in the first place.

This view again suggests that the word is dead except to the ones who wrote it, and we examine its remains, trying figure out what their relics meant to them with no such meaning to us-forgetting that it is also the word of a transcendent God to all of his people (a God who can speak of things that the ancients thought were not and have them be, just to circle back around to that). A denial of that seems more "western" or "modern" to me. The NT writers didn't treat the OT text like it is being said they should because they thought it spoke to them, and such people have to admit that Paul was an atrocious exegete by their standards.

[Marv]

The third time through that I think I got it...

"There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction.."

I understand that philosophy is not to replace revelation (reason is the devil's greatest whore and all), however this case appears far too overstated to be useful. For example I think errors in thought go to the fact that we are fallen, not in that we are philosophers.

And as I said these are different ways of looking at things, they are not antithetical and to be pitted against one another. A logical person is just as capable of understanding the scriptures as an intuitive one, because it is the Holy Spirit that gives illumination in the first place.

This view again suggests that the word is dead except to the ones who wrote it, and we examine its remains, trying figure out what their relics meant to them with no such meaning to us-forgetting that it is also the word of a transcendent God to all of his people (a God who can speak of things that the ancients thought were not and have them be, just to circle back around to that). A denial of that seems more "western" or "modern" to me. The NT writers didn't treat the OT text like it is being said they should because they thought it spoke to them, and such people have to admit that Paul was an atrocious exegete by their standards.

[Char]

Is it the last bit? I do like to keep it cryptic just to annoy Rey you know. Basically the quote implied it was bad when people "tried to answer their questions" from scripture as if the scripture did not and does not speak to them. It only spoke to those to whom it was originally written, answered them then it died and it's body was preserved in the formaldehyde of the bible. It only ever addressed that audience and their concerns.

And the view must then condemn Paul's use of the OT because he thought it was saying things to the then current community of believers. He didn't say in ancient culture this is how they would have understood such words, He just said the scriptures say this. They speak to us, Corinthians and Romans and...Christians.

[Rick C.]

joanne wrote:
I've been thinking and thinking about this. What do you all think?
______________________________

Thanks for these quotations, Joanne!

"Block logic's" my approach to hermeneutics.
(Exegesis - via authorial intention & meaning, etc.).
I plan to use your quotes to help explain "my theology" (and/or worldview) to a relatively new friend.

May I ask: How much time is devoted to this theme (approx. pages)?

Thanks!
Gr8 post!!

[joanne guarnieri]

Rick C. said:

How much time is devoted to this theme (approx. pages)?>

It's a whole chapter in the book, pp 141-163, including footnotes. Am delighted to meet you, and that you know what this means!!! I just finished the section that discussed "Hebraic Knowing" that is really where orthodoxy, orthopraxy and orthopathy intersect. It's the kind of truth that one knows, deep down, but didn't yet have words to describe.

It's not that often that a book will grip my attention on every page, but "ReJesus" is that kind of book for me. I'm finding I can't stop thinking about it.

Where do you teach, who do you teach?

[Harry]

Lutherans (not ELCA ) follow Luther's approach to Scripture. He let Scripture itself determine for him what any given passage means. This does not happen by some by some kind of immediate illumination from God, but from careful study of Scripture in which reason plays its proper role as servant, not master. In Luther's approach, besides considering the historical and grammatical setting, a third setting was all-important, namely, the scriptural setting. Luther insisted that Scripture must interpret Scripture.
Luther insisted that the meaning of a given passage is determined only by comparing what it says with all the other passage of Scripture which address the same subject in the same or similar words; and then by letting what God said in all those other passages explain what God means by the words in the passages under study. This is the only proper way to interpret a passage of Scripture because it is only in this way that God himself becomes the arbiter of what he means by those words.
The above comes from the book by David Kuske - Bibical Interpretation: The Only Right Way.

[Rick C.]

joanne guarnieri said:

Rick C. said:

How much time is devoted to this theme (approx. pages)?>

It's a whole chapter in the book, pp 141-163, including footnotes. Am delighted to meet you, and that you know what this means!!! I just finished the section that discussed "Hebraic Knowing" that is really where orthodoxy, orthopraxy and orthopathy intersect. It's the kind of truth that one knows, deep down, but didn't yet have words to describe.

It's not that often that a book will grip my attention on every page, but "ReJesus" is that kind of book for me. I'm finding I can't stop thinking about it.

Where do you teach, who do you teach?

Thanks for your reply, Joanne!
I read some reviews elsewhere and am considering buying the book.

I'm not a teacher in any formal capacity...but do attend "conversational Bible studies."

Understanding "Hebrew knowing" is seeing the Bible how it was originally meant & intended. Jewish thought, and thus, its theology - (and I place the original Christians in this category) - doesn't separate experience from theology: They go hand in hand.

When the Church became predominantly Gentile - then - entered theology of a more speculative and/or (Western) philosophical nature. I became acutely aware of this during a debate between Calvinists and Arminians about three years ago.

What happened was: I asked, "Is there any evidence from Scripture that Jesus and the Apostles were concerned with Ordo Salutis (the order of events occurring during initial salvation: Does faith come first in their minds? or is one regenerated first, then faith comes)?"

No one could answer that this was even in the minds of Jesus or the Apostles. I don't see evidence of it, myself. These are post-apostolic questions with post-apostolic answers, imo.

It's been very freeing for me to be "out" of the various debates that Christians get into along philosophical or philosophical theology lines. E.g., the Jews believed in both "eternal security" - and didn't! We Westerners have a hard time wrapping our minds around stuff like that!

Thanks!

P.S. Hi Char, Harry, et al

[Rick C.]

Addendum, a fairly long quotation from N.T. Wright in a 1996 address at Yale: "So What?"
(I listened to and typed this out on another forum, pertinent to the topic)

N.T. Wright wrote:
"Many of us grew up being taught to read the Bible in one or both of two ways.

"On the one hand there was the devotional reading: A passage each morning, and one prayed and listened to hear something that 'God was saying to me today' through it. The historical and literary setting was quite unimportant; what mattered was 'What does this say to me today?'. Now that's a venerable and not unimportant practise. But if it's divorced from other readings of Scripture it can become not only self-centered but also dangerously arbitrary. God doesn't deceive people but people can be, and often are, self-deceived. Detached devotional reading gets you so far but you can easily get stuck.

"On the other hand there was 'the Bible as proof texts'. Some classical instances come to mind; The Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, with its doctrinal statements and its big biblical footnotes. That encouraged a mentality which thought of the Bible as an unsorted collection of data, belonging in principle to a unified dogmatic theology; as though God had given us the Bible like a jig-saw puzzle in a box all shaken up into bits, needing to be assembled into a single picture which, whatever it was going to look like, sure as anything wouldn’t look like what we actually have from Genesis to Revelation.

"Within modernist Christianity this took, very broadly speaking, two forms: The evangelical form, in which the game was to get every single piece into the picture somewhere in order to to get one great big unified picture and: The liberal form, in which you were allowed to play chess with the pieces, letting one piece take another piece and so, removing it from the board (the audience laughs). The goal was still the same: 'a single unified picture' but the method was different.

"And nobody stopped to question whether either of those activities was actually what God gave us the Bible for. I grew up with the devotional and the proof-texting method side by side. They didn't really interlock as far as I was concerned. It is only from the vantage point of increasing middle age that I realize that all sorts of other things are to be taken seriously as part of use of the text.

The Bible...does form an essential and non-negotiable part of Christian Praxis (practice). The devotional use is right and God-given but it's only one part of the whole. Yes, the Bible does give answers to certain questions. It is right and God-intended that we should consult particular passages on particular topics, and emerge trembling and fearful with a definite word from God on definite and difficult and, perhaps, controversial topics whether political, theological or whatever. But, in addition to Praxis and Question, we must also develop and understand the Bible as Story and as Symbol. We will only get the praxis and the questions on the right road when we put them in that wider setting.

A word about the the Bible as Story: From the very early days of the canonical process the books were arranged, not under abstract topics: truth one, truth two, truth three, but as a complex and winding narrative. If you believe in the inspiration of Scripture you must believe that this is the book the Holy Spirit chose to give us; not an unsorted edition of something else, whether a manual of doctrine or devotion which we have to unscramble. But as a story, the True Story, which we are invited and summoned to live. And only when we take this seriously can we get away from the sterile debates of modernist Christianity, both liberal and conservative, as to whether this passage of Scripture is opposed to that one. Again and again, such debates play off passages of Scripture that belong at different moments in the Story!

"Concentrate on questions without narrative and you will create, and worry over, all sorts of unnecessary problems. (That's an oversimplification).

"But the Bible is also Symbol in the Church. Its regular and serious reading in public and in private; that's not just functional, as though all of that could be reduced to the simple conveying of true information or wise advice which you might in principle get by some other means. Rather, it is deeply symbolic....

"It is because modernist Christianity, whether evangelical or liberal, has forgotten about symbolism, the Bible is often trapped and muzzled within either a self-centered devotion or an arid proof texting....

"Once you understand the Bible as as Story and as Symbol, all sorts of things open up in front of you. You start to understand where you come, yourself, into the narrative that Scripture is telling. And you start to realize that your own reading of Scripture has become part of your own story. It has made your own personal, communal narrative what it is. When you read the Bible its not that it's reminding you of lots of true bits of information, true doctrine, or right moral teaching. It is becoming part of who you are."

end quote
________________________________

Wright doesn't specifically talk about seeing the text in a "Hebrew way." However, his ideas about narrative - the full biblical narrative - and what with Wright's insistence on always seeing the text from authorial (Jewish) perspectives; we're pointed in that direction strongly!

Lecture available on (unofficial) N.T. Wright Page, easily googled.

Thanks again!

[joanne guarnieri]

To Harry, yes, that's how I have long studied the Bible, with Luther's method of the Bible explaining the Bible. One can't go far wrong with that, I totally agree.

To Rick, Wow!! Terrific quote frm the N.T. Wright lecture. His name is coming up all too often in the various circles I spend time in. I need to read one of his books. Think I'll visit his website, thanks!

[Rick C.]

You're welcome, Joanne.

I'm gonna see if my church's book store has ReJesus this weekend.

N.T. Wright is fascinating.
I think you'll enjoy.

[Michael Patton]

It is the difference between Paul's train of thought and John. I don't think it is an either/or. As well, I don't ever think it is wise to label things like "Greek philosophy" as if this makes it inferior automatically to what is "biblical." The Greeks did not invent philosophy and it does not necessarily militate against truth. In fact, Romans 1 uses quite a bit of syllogistic logic and even says that people are without excuse for not believing it.

Sorry if I repeated what has already been said.