How Should we Approach the Bible? — Assumption • Kairos Introduction to Christian Apologetics

The God of the Bible exists.
The God of the Bible is capable of preparing and prompting people to do things.
God used people to write the Bible.
God had things he wanted to communicated through those human writers.
God was capable of steering circumstances to accomplish those communication goals through human writers.
God’s standards for accomplishing these goals were not undermined by the limitations of the people he prompted to write.
If God’s communication goals had been threatened by writers he prompted, he would have prompted different writers.
Biblical (=ancient) writers did what they did because of their cognitive environment — which was shared by their immediate audience.
Biblical writers utilized techniques that conformed to audience expectations and comprehension.
- The consumer will know whether the product is legitimate
- People are familiar with the templates at the time
- Revelation 4-5 — the law suite scene
We should therefore judge Scripture by God’s standards, not our own.
- Does it connect with the original audience well?
- Written for us, but not to us.
Our definitions of concepts like inerrancy and historicity should conform to God’s standards.
The alternative = judging the Bible as not confirming to what God didn’t intend it to be, which is incoherent.
- Genesis has more than 1 way to interpret
- Are you angry at your dog for not being a cat?
- You’re not happy with the Bible for it not making you happy?

Utilizing those assumptions

To prepare us for approaching the Bible and thinking carefully about the Bible

The biblical writers weren’t us.
- They didn’t think, act like us
The biblical writers wrote to people alive at the same time they were.
- Express themselves in ways their audience understand
The Bible’s dots are not connected by its writers. You’re not one of them.
- Read how they read and interpret each other
The Bible is not a channeled book.
- X-Files view of the Bible
- Trying to involve people as little as possible
No point of biblical teaching derives from a single verse.
- God will repeat his points.
- No verse on the origin of the soul (if God wants us to know)
- God will handle clarity
Writers write intentionally.
There’s no cosmic law that says you must say everything you could say when telling a story or making a point.
- You don’t learn everything you need from the passage, you should throw it away
One writer’s goals aren’t necessarily another writer’s goal.
The Bible never claims to be an exhaustive repository of everything that’s true.
- The Bible records what God wants the believing community to know
There is no reason to believe each biblical writer knew all the things every other biblical writer knew and wrote about.
- Kingdom - Progressive Revelation
- Certain events informed future/past events
There’s no cosmic law that says everything in the Bible must be unique to the Bible.
- Biblical writers were not Martians
- They live in ANE - their cultures might be the same (overlap)

For apologetics & interpretation

(Ch 6, Bible Unfiltered)

Uber-literalism

When a plain sense make sense, seek no other sense.

Sometimes context may forbid literalism.
Dictionary vs Encyclopedia
Cognitive environment - the word “father”
- Men & women - thoughts are better
- Based on experience
Pulpit
1. Elevated platform or high reading desk used in preaching or conducting a worship service
2. a: the reaching profession b: a preaching position
Church theology determines the meaning of pulpit
- Catholic has an altar
- Lutheran has 2
- Baptist - in the middle
Zechariah in Luke 1:78-79
- Sunrise? (Anatole) LXX translate “branch” (Messiah)
- Shoot, twig, rise
- LXX gives the cognitive environment we use to understand the Bible