L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #304 And the context of the Bible?

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #302 What is a word? no, seriously - Logos Forums

In public Canvas documents, Phil Gons shared an excellent diagram.

For some purposes this is sufficient but for a chunk of Christians, it is not. This is best illustrated by this quote from a how to study your Bible book genre.

There is one place you can go where Biblical interpretation is consistent and complete. Someone has done the work for you, and you can hear it (not just read it) in a location near you.

Go to Church.

In the Orthodox church, the liturgical hymns, chants and prayers of the worship services are almost entirely composed of quotations or allusions to the Bible. And those that aren’t are usually either hymns glorifying God through the deeds of one of his saints, or—you guessed it—proper, historical interpretation of Biblical verses and themes.

These are especially noteworthy during the Vespers and Matins services of the Great Feasts of the Church, and most concentrated during the Lenten season.

The Church wants you to hear it. The Church wants you to learn it, so that in reading the Scriptures at home, on your own, you will see more and more of the same. You will begin to see the design and patterns of the Bible, not according to some theory, but the natural patterns which exist themselves. Your sense of the faith (sensus fidei) will be formed by the Bible itself.

You will be reading the Bible with the mind of the Church, the prophets, the apostles and the saints from every age. You will be reading the Bible and interpreting it properly, historically, truly and consistently with Christians from every age, and the prophets before Christ.

This holistic view typical of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox (and some Western churches) requires a liturgical/ecclesial context that is broader than Bible. Some would want to replace "liturgical" with "worship"; some would want to make them two separate contexts.

And as the outermost layer, one must include culture no matter what theological tradition you belong to. The event I read of which made be actually understand this was of a seminarian in Rome from South Asian explaining to his classmates that Christmas as the coming of light didn't work for him because the coming of light was associated for him with the coming of the monsoon season - a very negative image.

What each user needs to do, at least in their mind, is to take the diagram of Phil Gons, modified as they deem appropriates, and identify the tools or library books that can help them at each level. In other words, put Phil's model to work for you.