the you're listening to Tim Bulkeley's
Five Minute Bible What did the text mean?
The first of the five steps in the simple five-step process is to look at
"what did the text mean?"
and similarly in our student exegesis assignments
we ask them to state the intended meaning for the ancient hearers
ideally in one sentence or maybe two never more than fifty words
students have two problems with this they're not beset like like biblical
scholars are by defining
which ancient hearers, we'll come back to that, their first problem is being brief
saying anything in less than fifty words
I've got a Sansblogue post which addresses that issue
but the second is that they often tend to forget
that the text ever had ancient hearers
yet the Bible is a record of communicative acts
and communicative acts are always contextual
communication always happens between
two people or groups of people
in particular contexts. Several of these Five Minute Bible podcasts address this
issue
this one is the first a little series that focuses particularly on this
question
there are some holy books, like perhaps the Koran
the believed to be timeless and de-contextualized
there are others like perhaps the I Ching
that are thought of as magical or quasi-magical with their ability to address
people in all sorts of times and places but the Bible
is "just" a complex communicative act
it's a very complex 1 according to Christians since it involves the Holy
Spirit
communicating with people in all sorts of times and places
through human active communication at particular
times and places. that's what some hermeneuts and if the art and science of
understanding
is hermeneutics then a person who does it is surely a hermeneut that's what some
hermeneuts call the Double
Agency of Scripture, double agency sounds like a
a complicated highfaluting idea but really quite simple
and actually we're quite used to the notion
of doubly agented it texts in everyday life
all messages except ones that are
written or transmitted through one of the modern newfangled electronic media
have double agency when
a diplomat took a message from his king to another country
the message
was delivered by the diplomat but on behalf of the King
it was presumed to be
doubly agented
of course, biblical scholars make the human agency of this double agency
in itself more complicated because they noticed that many biblical texts
seem to have been edited thus adding
layers to the human agenting of the text
but still the notion that
an Old Testament text was addressed to ancient Israelites
and/or ancient Judahites or Jews before it was addressed to modern Christians is
surely not a difficult one to grasp
yet students find it difficult because
we Christians have become used to
using the bible as a band-aid we grab a bit of Bible
and we slap it on whatever issue or problem is in front of us today
with no thought as to where this but a Bible came from
or what it was intended to do
it's a bit like someone who goes into the tool shed
and grabs a saw uses it to hammer in a nail
for a really neat example of how all this works out
try listening to my podcast on the Lost and Found Parables in Luke 15
do listen to it next because next podcast in this series is going to
depend
on the material in that one because
as we'll see with that podcast I cheated
left out a significant element maybe as you listen to it you can think about
what that might have been
in the meanwhile I do hope that you discover the Bible as something much
deeper and richer than just a band-aid
bye for now, God bless