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Research and Writing Workflow

It should come as no surprise, but I love to read, research, and write. And to make that reading accessible to me after I’ve first churned it up in my mind, I’m trying to develop a workflow for capturing notes and being able to sync them flawlessly between my iPad and iMac for further research and writing. I should have thought about this sooner but thankfully it’s not too late either.

I wanted to share this website from John Chandler that is proving exceptionally helpful to me in developing a solid workflow.

Why I Shy Away from “Application”

In thinking about and planning for future speaking engagements, whether they be sermons, lectures, or even leading my bible study, I am thinking again about “application.” There seem to be lots of people out there saying that preaching the Word is not enough, it needs to be applied to our lives. There even seem to be many whose sermons are only geared toward the “application of truths to peoples lives,” many times through the popular 3 point sermon where the 3 points use one word all starting with the same letter, e.g., “pursuit, purpose, passion,” or something like that.

Without denying the truthfulness of Scripture needing to be “applied to our lives,” I think many have gone off the deep end in an effort to make everything immediately relevant in a way that people know is immediately relevant to their lives. This approach holds the Word hostage to our immediate needs, making everything person-centered rather than Christ-centered. The result, I believe, is to use the Bible as a personal application book for life’s little problems. However, the Bible is more than this.

The reason I think more needs to be said, and why I often shy away from such application, is that it fails to allow for the Word to shape our worldviews and transform our hearts. Instead it offers us a bunch of do’s and don’ts. “Be like David, he was a good man for the most part. Don’t be like David, however, when he committed adultery, that’s bad.” But if my worldview is me-centered, the command to not commit adultery, while extremely important and to be obeyed because it comes from God, we reason, may not be convenient for me at all times and should be done away with when I deem it “necessary.”

What I’m really on about is speaking against poor application that distorts the Bible and fails to recognize that teaching about Jesus and the good news and the kingdom, etc., really produces change in people so that they will, out of the overflow of their hearts, live as transformed kingdom people. In my opinion, this is good “application.” The application pointers beyond this may be useful, but not in order to short-circuit the true work of worldview transformation. And we could definitely use some worldview transformation rather than trying to fit Jesus into our people-centered worldviews.

Short-circuting Meaning by Interpreting Scripture with Scripture

I listened to a sermon this week (not at my home church so you won’t be able to figure out who it was) where I noticed something good being taken to an extreme and made useless.

Many will be familiar with the saying, “Scripture interprets Scripture.” In this sermon I listened to this principle was taken to an extreme, and in my opinion, ended up distorting Scripture. What happened was that this preacher was in a text and instead of starting from the local meaning, immediately jumped to other parts of Scripture that use some of those same words and used the other passage to interpret the first passage. He ended up with a meaning to the first text that struck me as oddly not close to what the text was saying in its own context. What was short-circuted was the local meaning of the first text.

So where does “Scripture interpreting Scripture” come in to play? After all, if we believe there is ultimately one Author behind the whole Bible, as I believe there is, then this must be true at some level. I believe it comes into play after the local meaning of the text has been worked out. Only then is it easier to see whether the other texts being used to interpret the first are even getting on about the same thing.

Better, “Scripture interpreting Scripture” should work on a biblical theological plane instead of a strict exegetical plane. That is, I don’t believe we can exegete a text simply by noting the meaning of a text elsewhere that also uses some similar words or something [a more robust lexical analysis is appropriate but that is beyond the scope of this post]. Rather, once we have worked on the meanings of each text in their context then we can talk about how to integrate them on a higher plane, that being, a biblical theological plane. I.e., how do these texts fit into the larger storyline of the Bible?

And, in the end, we may find that we have to adjust our exegesis of individual texts based on our biblical theological reading, but that is acceptable. There isn’t a perfectly linear line from exegesis to biblical theology to systematic theology. There are feedback loops. Our systematics will affect our exegesis as will our biblical theology affect our exegesis, etc. But by trying to integrate too quickly at a local level we lose the opportunity to understand how the local level affects the other levels.

Why I Find Bible Study so Challenging

Since becoming a Christian I have loved the study of the Bible. I hated it before, but immediately fell in love with it after. This, I suggest, is the work of the Spirit. But I have to admit, several years into studying the Bible and it being the main passion of my life (in order to seek Jesus), I still find it thoroughly challenging.

I could mention that I find it challenging to follow its worldview in some ways, but that’s not where I’m going with these thoughts right now. I find it challenging to discern its meaning.

I’ve grown up holding two fairly conflicting worldviews in tension: that of a sort of ‘positivism’ and that of a sort of ‘postmodern deconstructionism.’ Positivism essentially means that I look at a text (say, the New Testament) and immediately gain a window onto objective reality and events as they really happened. There is the author and his or her intent and the events which he or she narrates and I can know them objectively. Postmodern deconstruction, on the other hand, essentially sees no authorial intent in the text but rather sees the text as a mirror reflecting back upon the reader their own viewpoints. Somehow I’ve subconsciously walked these two lines, contradictory though they are. Having not thought through them prior to becoming a Christian and a philosophy major, I’m sure I just unconsciously applied them at different times as it was convenient to do so.

It seems to me that there are Christians who fall into one of either camp (or both like I somehow did). On the positivist side, Christians sometimes think that the objective meaning of the events and author’s intent are simply there and easy to ascertain. On the postmodern side, Christians sometimes approach the text in terms of ‘what it means to me,’ never asking the historical question. What matters is the reader’s response.

But the reason I find Bible study so challenging is that meaning is not so simple. In fact, I think both sides have aspects of it right but have absolutized their position into falsehood. Indeed, Christians so often rail against postmodernism as an enemy (usually in favour of an equally non-Christian position, that of modernism) failing to recognize that it has developed in response to things that were left unaccounted for in the prior prevailing worldview (modernism). Yes the pendulum has swung too far to the other extreme, but postmodernism has helped us remember that there is in fact a reader in the reading process that must be taken into account. And that reader brings all sorts of presuppositions and viewpoints to the text they read. Postmodernism’s failure, however, is that it has lost any anchor, something a Christian should be very cautious about unless abandoning “God has spoken” is something desirable.

In responding to postmodernism as Christians, I believe we also need to be careful not to swing the pendulum back again and forget the reader in the process. I have seen, at least in popular discussion, this sort of thing happening.

Navigating these waters is not easy. That, or I’m just not that bright (entirely possible!). Or, I am sure someone will say I’m not allowing the Spirit to speak. Well, maybe, but when I look at 4 legitimate Christians and their take on the same text and the differences present, I am persuaded that our mind/thinking plays an important role in the interpretive process. That’s for another post, and there are good books out there that would show it biblically (both John Piper and Mark Noll have recently written books to this effect).

So, should I despair? No, I think there is a ‘middle ground’ or what have you, that doesn’t succumb to either positivism or deconstructionism. It recognizes there is a reader with presuppositions but it also recognizes that the reader can be shaped by the worldview of the text, produced with some intent that can be (to some degree) obtained. This itself is the content of whole books but it feels good to write some of this out, even if in broad-strokes and so preliminarily.

What do you think?

Too Many Commentaries

As I study to get back into the John series (John 2:1-11 coming up shortly), I am learning for myself that I don’t need to read every commentary on a text. There is a place for that if one is working on a scholarly paper but for the purposes of preparing the type of text studies I’m working on for this blog and for others preparing Bible studies and preaching, too many commentaries just seem to be a drag. I’m starting to learn which commentaries I’m most helped by in general and specifically on the Gospel of John. The best first step is always the original text. The last good step is a few helpful commentaries. But having too many of the wrong sort just slow things down unnecessarily.

Perhaps toward the end of the John series on this blog I’ll review the commentaries I’ve worked with and provide a judgment of my opinion of their usefulness.