CS215 Contours for a Bible Based Christ Centred Worldview

Christianity World View

1. Authors view of “eternal relevance”

Eternal Relevance means that it is about all the humanity irrespective of ages and cultures. It relates its orientation with all the humanity of all the cultures. It is not limited to a particular culture or society. Moreover, it means that Bible is for the betterment of all the humanity. As per the beliefs of author, Bible should be read, understand and learn by all the groups of people from varying social and cultural backgrounds.

2. Historical Particularity

According to the author of “Fee and Stuart” , historical particularity about the subject topic would differ from one book to other, the culture orientation surrounding the origination of books. All the historical perspectives irrespective of varying cultural, political and social factors do affect the understanding of the topic. It is considerably different in understanding the background of Isaiah of the eighth-century BC of the expectations of messianic of Israel. Different historical perspectives have different understanding about the Christianity World View. To understand the biblical book of each time, it is necessary to understand the occasions and themes at the concerned time. Moreover, the occasions and surrounding circumstances would help in understanding efficiently the context of that time biblical book.

3. First Task and its Facts

The first task is about “EXEGESIS”, which constitute of a systematic study of the available facts to find out the original meaning of the scripture. This helps us establishing the actual meaning of the scripture based on the mentioned task. EXEGESIS study requires the highest level of education in biblical languages, Greco-Roman Backgrounds, the Jewish etc. However, to understand the actual meaning of the scripture, the EXEGESIS is not demanding any superior knowledge of the mentioned skills.

The study of the EXEGESIS is tough to undergo, as it require the helps from some experts who is well versed in biblical languages, the Jewish and many more. However, it is helpful in understanding the biblical book of different time from the perspectives of EXEGESIS with the help of experts.

4. Key to good “EXEGESIS”

The key to good EXEGESIS is to read the text carefully and to understand the task. After understanding the task, right questions needed to be asking to understand the any difficulties in conducting the reading through the EXEGESIS process. One of the best and most feasible ways in this context would be the reading of How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler. The people generally are not aware of reading in a good manner. This is where this book is helpful.

Two questions

The two most important kinds of questions that every biblical passage needs to be answered in order to understand with the help of EXEGESIS is related to the context and related to the content.

What is the context?

What is the content?

Furthermore, the questions that are related to the context are of two kinds such as historical and literary.

5. Historical and Literary Contexts

Historical context differs from one book to another depends on several factors such as the background, time & audience, culture of author. It is very tough to understand the historical contexts because of the fact that the background of the origin is not known. The cultural awareness of the author, the audience background at that time or the societal life of the mentioned period are all very important to understand in order to understand the historical contexts.

Literary is one of the most crucial tasks in EXEGESIS, which is indeed easy to understand by learning it thoroughly without any help from the experts. It means that words in the sentences have clear meanings and easily understandable. It also becomes easy to understand the biblical context in such format as the proceeding and the succeeding sentences are in sequential form.

6. Tools

• Good translation skills for the given texts
• Availability of an efficient Bible dictionary
• Efficient commentaries

There are other tools also available to have a good understanding of the contexts; however, these are the three important tools to understand the contexts efficiently. This is obvious as translation is important to understand the biblical contexts. Moreover, availability of dictionary is also very useful as some of the words that are used in Bible might not be the common words. It might have some orientations from the religious points of views.

7. Hermeneutics

It means to cover the entire understanding of the interpretation that also includes EXEGESIS. It is also used for taking help on seeking relevance of contemporary ages from texts of ancient ages. It establishes the question asking the capability to its reader about the Bible such as meaning of the Bible. Questions like “here and now” are established in the Hermeneutics, which resemble its relation with asking questions at every stage in reading and learning the biblical passage. This conveys a message that only devotional learning is not the scope of Bible, it rather has something bigger than this. It can also be read for learning.

8. Beliefs of Author in relation to “EXEGESIS”

Hermeneutics is sufficient to have knowledge on the biblical passage as this also includes the EXEGESIS method. However, as per the author beliefs, it is advisable to undergo the EXEGESIS process first as this helps in understanding the biblical passage efficiently. Nevertheless, before having any understanding on the biblical passage, it is very tough to pose questions at different level of passages through Hermeneutics.

9. Process to interpret Scriptures

The basic process, which the learner generally uses to understand the biblical passage, includes the following:

• Concerning to the experts of Bible such as Priest, father of the Church
• Referring to the Bible dictionary
• Understanding the Hebrew language
• Consulting to some scholar to get the background of each context in order to understand the biblical passage more efficiently

The learner generally uses some more processes other than what the author has mentioned such as consulting to some of the scholars to understand the background behind each context. This is helpful in conducting a ground level study of the Bible.