While the Bible is perfectly designed to be our guide for faith and life, we were not the original audience. And reading it as if we were is simplistic and dangerous. Learning this one, simple truth will both unlock the depths of God’s Word while also guarding us from bad interpretation.
First, the complicated version. Good teachers have taught us that we need to read the Bible while paying attention to both the grammar and the history involved. They even have a fancy word for it: the grammatico-historical method. The grammar part of this makes sense to most people: we need to pay attention to words, sentences, and paragraphs and how they work together. When we see the word “love,” we need to see if it’s a noun or verb, we need to see what part that word is playing in the sentence, and what role that sentence has in the argument being made by the author. It’s easier said than done, but most students of the Bible at least agree that we need to pay attention to the words of the text.
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