- So when we come to the Bible,
we need to realize that it's not just a book.
It is a book.
It's a book, a holy book that God has given us
where He reveals Himself in it.
But it's also a holy library.
(chuckles) It's a little library of 66 books.
And sometimes people forget that,
and they have a tendency to sort of flatten it out
and just read it as just one style of writing.
We don't do that in modern day life.
We're not usually consciously aware
of the different genres around us,
but the media, both movies, videos, books, print material,
there's all kinds of genres around us
that we unconsciously make judgments about,
help us understand how to interpret them more accurately.
If you're working on your car
and it has very precise instructions
about how this little measurement
on a spark plug has to be,
you're not like, well, you know,
it's just supposed to be small, you know.
Point three millimeters, that doesn't matter.
Well, yeah it does matter
because, you know, you can look at it, you read it.
That's a scientific diagram that you're reading.
That's very precise information.
Or if you pick up the mail and there's a letter,
probably misspells your name,
and it says, you know,
dear mister so and so,
you've just won 10 million dollars.
You don't start dancing around.
"I won 10 million dollars!"
You understand because the day we live in, the genre,
that's an advertisement, that's a marketing technique.
You really have not won 10 million dollars.
On the other hand,
if you receive a letter with a red stamp on it,
electricity to be turned off,
you're not like,
"Oh, they're just trying to get my money,
"it's an advertisement."
You're like, "Whoah, someone didn't pay the bill!"
Like, we make these judgements.
Or we, as modern day viewers of videos,
you know, you can watch a movie
and they have flashback scenes to where someone's younger,
you know what that is
because you've been watching that kind of genre
all your life
but if we were to show this to some person
in another time or culture,
they may be completely confused as to what's happening
at that point in the story
because we just know the cues of that.
Well the Bible has many different genres
and there are many assumptions associated with them
and you can usually figure out those assumptions
just by carefully reading the text
and seeing how the text is interpreted
and how other biblical authors pick up those texts
so this is not like we're imposing
some kind of foreign grid
but we're trying to hear the authors themselves
as they have guided us to understand their writings.
Most classes and books on interpretation,
how to interpret the Bible
will take maybe half the time or more
to go through different genres of Scripture
so the idea that I could cover this comprehensively
in a video is just impossible.
But any decent biblical book on hermeneutics,
and I'll just mention I have authored one,
it's called "40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible"
about half of that is going through different genres
of Scripture
and talking about how do we understand them rightly,
is going to talk about the rules and patterns
to not misunderstand them.
Probably the most common genre of Scripture
is historical narrative.
If you read through the Old Testament,
over half the Old Testament
is reporting through narrative
what God and His people have done through history.
We find tons of historical narrative
in the New Testament.
The Gospels, the Book of Acts,
sections of Revelation and so on,
could be classified as historical narrative
in the midst of apocalyptic genre.
So we have lots of historical narrative
and that is, sadly, for some modern interpreters
who are struggling with this,
that can be very difficult
if they've not been trained in that, right?
Now, God and His wisdom revealed His word
in historical narrative.
And one reason he did that, I'm convinced,
is because just how captivating story is.
Our hearts and minds are written to be captivated by story.
But sadly, this is also something
that can be easily misinterpreted.
Someone takes some details out of the story
and just kind of runs with it
without attention to actually how that functions
within the book as a whole
or within the narrative as a whole.
I mean, one of the most important points
for interpreting historical narrative is context.
Just people not reading it in context.
And asking the question,
"Hey, what is the author of 2 Chronicles
"trying to teach me in reporting this?"
What was he trying to teach his ancient audience
and what are the modern day implications, applications,
and redemptive historical trajectory within the cannon
related to that teaching?
Especially within the Gospels,
I think a helpful phrase to ask is,
fill this out, I got this from a mentor of mine.
"I, Mark, am telling you this story about whatever because."
Like why was the biblical author,
what was he wanting us to believe about Jesus
or why he came or what he was doing
or what it means to follow Him.
What is he teaching through that story?
That's such a pivotal question.
Another common genre we find in the Bible is epistles.
This is one that evangelicals love.
The letters of the New Testament.
And a lot of the times the meaning is a lot more
on the surface, right?
It's a theological teaching
or moral implications of that teaching.
But, again, there is, oftentimes,
a cultural distance there.
For example, 1 Corinthians 8-10,
Paul's talking about meat offered to idols.
Now, there are few cultures
that I've interacted with
where that is a live issue.
People live somewhere where there is food
that has been offered to idols,
and they have to decide as a Christian community
can I eat this or whatever.
It's not something most modern Christians have to deal with.
However, are there, if you look at the passage,
if you look at the text,
Paul says hey, food's been, someone sacrifices food
to an idol who, doesn't matter, God created everything,
eat it, don't eat it, you know,
you're not worshiping the idol to eat that meat.
However, if someone has a sense of conscience
and they associate it with sin
and then they do that,
in their mind they are sinning
and if we encourage them to do that
or we're not thoughtful
in the way we deal with that sensitive moral debate
or moral issue,
then we could encourage them to stumble and fall, right?
So love takes priority over freedom
even though we want people to grow up
in their maturity
and not be flawed in their understanding of moral issues.
So are there debated moral issues today
that someone can have a very sensitive conscience about
or because of their background
they can associate something
and then you know, you can think about, for example,
different styles of music.
Someone, let's say, comes from a background
where they associate a certain style of music
with a wicked lifestyle.
When they hear that music,
it awakens those memories and thoughts,
and there's nothing wrong in that music
in and of itself, I would argue, the style of music, right?
But, you know, you could imagine a situation
where a community would say
we're going to forego playing that song
because brother so and so,
not because it just offends them,
they like, "I don't like that music!"
But because it's inciting them,
it's eliciting, it's tempting them
to think and do things that are sinful.
And so we care more about our brothers' walk with Jesus
than we do about our freedom.
And so, it's reading epistolary literature,
sometimes it's thinking about
what in a modern day context
is faithfully analogous
to what the biblical author's teaching.
And we want it to be faithful implications,
not unrelated implications to that.
There's so many other genres of Scripture, right?
There's psalms, there's prophecy, there's proverbs,
there's the apocalyptic, there's, you know,
the book of Revelation
and portions of Ezekiel and Daniel
where you have these visions and colors
and to unveil what's really going on in the world
and what is going to go on in the world.
And, maybe we'll just think about one other one
because there's not time to deal
with all the different rules
and patterns associated with these.
Think about proverbs.
Someone can think, "Oh, proverbs,
"those are promises from God."
And they can run with that
and then they can end up being really confused
or hurting other people.
You say, well how is that?
Well, you say, you know, in Proverbs it says
"Lazy hands make a man poor,
"but diligent hands bring wealth."
So someone can take that
and then they can say, well, you know,
there's a poor guy.
Look at that guy on the street, he must be lazy.
Or, you know, look at that wealthy guy,
he must be really diligent.
Or maybe they work hard in their life
and they end up in poverty
and they're like, I don't know,
I must be doing something wrong.
I thought I was hard working but I'm living in poverty.
But you have to realize there are lots of other proverbs
about wealth and poverty, too.
You know, it says "A man's field may produce abundant crops
"but injustice sweeps it away."
You're like, so, if you think about it,
the proverbs are very, most of them,
are very situational.
They're describing what normally happens in life
in this world that we live in,
through this lens of God's evaluation,
His moral evaluation of that,
but it doesn't give all the exceptions.
And each one is not dealing with all the situations.
It is true in this life
that someone who is lazy usually will end up being,
living in economic depravation.
It's not always true.
Someone can be born to such immense wealth
that they live wealthy all their lives lazily.
It's also someone else could be just not diligent,
they could buy a lottery ticket
and win tons of money, right?
That happens.
But we also see there are patterns where
someone could work very hard
and then what they've worked for
and all their wealth is swept away
by other people's injustice and wickedness.
So what we need to realize
is many times the proverbs are situational
and that they are describing,
and it takes wisdom, right, to know when to apply them
and if the situation is described by that proverb
or if there's another proverb that fits it better.
And so I think that students,
careful readers of the Bible,
as we come to the different genres of Scripture,
and we being to think more self consciously
about reading them faithfully,
maybe a teacher or a book begins to get us,
oh wow, you know, and you think
"I have thought about it like that."
Is that really right to think that way
when I'm reading, you know, the psalms,
or the prophecy, I've had a tendency to do this.
And then what that leads us to,
I hope and pray,
is to just be more careful and faithful readers
of the Scripture.
So I've had someone ask me before,
"Aren't you just importing a lot of man-made rules
"onto the Bible to talk about genres?"
And my response to that would be no, no we're not.
What we're seeking to do when we talk about genre
is to respect the inspired author
and his assumptions
and the literary conventions
under which he wrote.
We're wanting to hear him.
Now, to come to those rules and principles, again,
is, ultimately you can defend that, I think,
from just a careful reading
of those original documents,
from the careful reading
of the literature of Scripture itself.
So principles for interpreting genres,
all that is, is a careful reading
of those different genres,
summarizing the assumptions the biblical authors have
for their audience when they come to that.
So all we're doing in talking
in faithful discussion of biblical genre,
is just, like, let's hear this word from God,
unfiltered,
let's hear it in its full strength and power.
And we're trying to take off the layers
of our own cultural and literary biases
that we have a tendency to import
onto any text that we read.
So that when we come,
we're respecting what the inspired author
is writing there,
what he's intending.
We're not importing wrong and different
and modern assumptions to reading, that revelation,
but we're bowing the knee
to the authority of Scripture
when we read those genres faithfully as intended
by the inspired authors.
- [Narrator] Thanks for watching Honest Answers.
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