L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #322 Using workflows to actually learn something from your reading

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: none

Speaking for myself, when I am reading I'll run into something fascinating, say to myself "I need to try that in reading the Bible", and by the time I'm actually reading the Bible, I will have forgotten, or not be able to find it again, or . . . Then I hit upon the idea of making quick and dirty workflows by simply copying excerpts of the text ... this protects me from, in my ignorance, accidently changing the intent when I try to reword it.

Two examples from Martin Luther:

Luther, Martin (and Philip Melanchthon)

• Martin Luther & Philip Melanchthon’s Law and Gospel | from Wengert, Timothy J. Word of Life: Introducing Lutheran Hermeneutics. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2019.
• Martin Luther’s Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio | Timothy J. Wengert, Word of Life: Introducing Lutheran Hermeneutics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2019), 143–144

In the first, as I was trying it I finally understood how it is a variation on the much older letter & spirit distinction -- not exactly the same but an unsurprising leap for an Augustinian.

In the second, the tentatio is a form of the proof is in the pudding that I'd never seen before ... if you got your scripture right the devil should be attacking you. This concept is one I will be exploring further.

Irenaeus of Lyon

• Irenaeus of Lyon’s Three principles of validating an interpretation | Westerholm, Stephen, and Martin Westerholm. Reading Sacred Scripture: Voices from the History of Biblical Interpretation. Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016.

This simply reminded me of how early the principles of validating an interpretation are ... and it is clear that Irenaeus didn't consider it a momentous new discovery.

I thought there were a couple of Dwight Moody examples but I don't find them now.

For Luther's Law & Gospel:

The introduction

A snippet of the steps with more rewording than some.

I have found this use of workflows to be very helpful for (a) understanding the text I'm reading and (b) to find tidbits of interpretation techniques worth adding to my toolbox.

Beloved Amodeo

I'm surprised that this tip has not received more attention. It has broad application and I will happily adopt it into my system of study. Thank you for your incredible output of useful observations and unique applications for use with the software.