Two nights ago I began a study on the Gospel according to John at my church. It was a good evening (I believe) where we dealt with a number of introductory matters.

Of course, first we introduced the study and how we would proceed.

Next we talked about the Gospel according to John as a whole. We discussed things like the group’s impressions of the book coming into the study, how it differs from the Synoptics, what its purpose is, who wrote it and when, etc.

Finally we talked about how we are going to go about interpreting this book and most of what we talked about pertains to the Bible as a whole. So, we talked about what follows from God being the Author of the Bible and what follows from humans being authors of the Bible. What sort of gaps do we have to traverse to get back to a 1st c. understanding of the NT (e.g. historical, cultural, linguistic, etc.)? Where does John fit in redemptive-history and what difference does that make to how we connect it to the rest of Scripture and how we apply it today? And how does application work? I concluded this section by talking about a hermeneutic of humility and a hermeneutic of faith. I’ll share more on those in a future post.

We spent an hour and a half on those things and it amazes me that we really only scratched the surface on a lot of those topics. We could easily have taken three or four hours (or longer, really). But I think it was as much as many in the church need to set the stage for getting into the text of John and surely things will come up as we go along that need to be addressed about interpretation.