Kentucky has a problem, and it’s not just a problem in this state.  It’s in fact an endemic problem throughout America, but some places are worse than others.  Particularly in my own portion of the country, the South, it is a huge, one could say weighty, one could say obese problem.  For the record, I’m not talking about people who have inherited problems that they have to fight their entire lives to stay reasonably fit.  I’m talking about diet and... Read more

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You will remember that I mentioned in a previous post in this series that we need to have a clear grasp on the concept of progressive revelation.  By this I mean that God revealed to his people his truth gradually over time, and that as the author of Hebrews says the revelation before Christ was incomplete, it was partial and piecemeal.  Also, God’s revelation was appropriate to the audience that he revealed it to.  It was not something way beyond... Read more

What exactly is the pathway to the Kingdom of God and what are the entrance requirements?  Jesus and Paul both talk about entering, obtaining or inheriting the Kingdom of God. Now the important thing about such discussions is that in each of those cases what is envisioned is a future entering of God’s kingdom when it comes on earth as it is in heaven.  It is not about dying and going to heaven.  While Paul says flesh and blood cannot... Read more

In some ways, the most difficult things to interpret in the Bible are the historical narratives.  Not the laws, not the wisdom literature, not the prophecies. No it’s the narratives.  Why?  In part, it is because of the striking honesty of the narratives. We see even the main positive characters sin and have feet of clay, with the notable exception of Jesus of course. This is true of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Joshua, Gideon, and I could go on... Read more

  One of the tendencies of conservative readers of the Bible is to minimize, ignore, misinterpret or whittle off the bits that are difficult or where there are differences in the accounts.  Let’s deal with examples of each mistake, taking the latter example first. As is well known, the four accounts of the three denials of Christ by Peter accompanied by cockcrow or cockcrows differ.  All of the accounts agree that Peter did exactly what Jesus predicted he would do,... Read more

Eschatology is by definition the study of the final or end things, but the term itself has been coupled with the term apocalyptic to refer to a specific kind of eschatology, dealing with a specific kind of prophecy— namely visionary prophecy like one finds in Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah, the book of Revelation, and various early Jewish books like 1 Enoch or even 4 Ezra. A word of caution is in order. The last place to start reading and interpreting the... Read more

The Bible is not, overall, a piece of coded literature written in elaborately allegorical manner with all sorts of hidden meanings, which needs to be decoded to be understood.  Thank goodness.  Just to be clear what allegory is– it is a story which has a surface meaning within the story, but in fact those story elements refer primarily to things outside the story. Typical allegories are the Christian example Pilgrim’s Progress or the literary example Spencer’s The Fairy Queen.  One... Read more

The Bible is a wonderful collection of all sorts or genres of literature, and it does not just involve prose and poetry though it has plenty of both of those types of literature. Ideally, the goal of Biblical Interpretation is to interpret the Bible as the inspired authors intended for us to interpret it.  When they are being figurative, let them be figurative, when they are being literal, let them be literal. When they are using symbols let’s not turn... Read more

One of the perennial problems of Biblical Interpretation is figuring out what exactly the Bible is trying to teach us. NOT, what are all the subjects mentioned in passing, but what subjects does the Bible teach us about.  The list of what it doesn’t teach us about is much longer than what it does, for example the Bible is not a scientific textbook of any sort.  It does not teach cosmology, it does not teach evolution, it does not teach... Read more