So, I recently began attending seminary. This is pretty much huge for me. I've learned so much in the first two weeks and it seems that most of the things I am learning should be Christianity 101. Seriously, why do they not teach you church history and hermeneutics upon conversion? It seems as though "How to Read the Bible" should probably be an essential thing to know. People assume they know way more than they really do about what the heck they are reading in the Bible. At least I did until I started taking this hermeneutics class. I would dare to venture that there is a lot of unintentionally misguided [or at least quite shallow] exegesis going on in the church right now, simply because we have a generally crummy understanding of how to read the Bible. And how would we unless someone were to teach us? It's just a shame that one must work toward a master's degree in order to learn something so fundamental. Maybe it's just my personal experience speaking here. Maybe I just haven't had much of a desire up until now to really step back and think about it. But I truly believe that most Christians DON'T KNOW how much they DON'T KNOW about the Bible. And shouldn't we be dying to know more if knowing Biblical truth is knowing the very God who inspired it?
Holla.
This is awesome. I would love to take a class like that... How to read the bible. Back in St. Augustine, our Youth Pastor really pushed for us to be learning more than the simple stories of the bible or just the teachings. We really dug into them & it left us all thirsty for more. I miss that a lot. So much of what we learn in church or at bible study seem so surface.
ReplyDelete