Question about Dictionary of Theological Interpretation of Bible

Ted Weis

The Dictionary of Theological Interpretation of the Bible is 45% off in March Madness sale.

Question for those of you who own this already this resource...

Is it helpful? Do you use it regularly?

Does it populate in Logos 6 when you do Factbook on big themes and ideas for a book of Bible?

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Comments

Scott E. Mahle

I absolutely love this resource. Its list of contributors as well as the variety of articles is quite impressive. However, don’t purchase it if your desire is to see it in Factbook or Topic Guide because it won’t be there. [8o|]

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/709243#Comment_709243

I absolutely love this resource.

I don't but neither do I hate it. It is a bit of a strange animal.

if your desire is to see it in Factbook or Topic Guide because it won’t be there

This is limiting and would be nice for Logos to fix. Even then, often there won't be hits because of the paucity of articles in this dictionary compared to something like ISBE or AYBD or even NBD.

Dan Francis

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/709257#Comment_709257

I do love this work, I do not own it in Logos, but have it in OT as it was significantly cheaper there. It is a good work well worth having but as noted it is hardly exhaustive or the depth one one would find in a multivolume work.

-dan

Here is a sample - Martin Luther:

Luther, Martin

Born, on his mother’s side, into the pious Lindemann family, Martin Luther was baptized on November 11, 1483, the day after his birth. He grew up in a world where the words of the Bible were heard often:through preaching and the liturgy, through the psalmody and biblical verses one learned in school, and so on. Later, as an Augustinian friar in the Black Cloister in Erfurt, he listened as the Scriptures were read corporately many times each day, and he diligently studied the red- leather Bible he had received as a novice for personal study and reflection. Ordained a priest in 1507, he began expositing the Scriptures regularly as a preacher. At the insistence of his superior, Johannes von Staupitz, he then undertook academic preparations for a career as professor of Bible. He earned the so- called baccalaureus biblicus (“bachelor of Bible” degree) in 1509, after two years of lecturing on assigned biblical texts. In 1512, he was awarded the doctor’s cap and ring and installed as professor of Bible in the frontier town of Wittenberg. He began his teaching career with a course on the Psalms (Dictata super Psalterium, 1513–15), and lectured on the OT for all but three or four of his thirty- two years in the classroom, including ten years on Genesis (1535–45). More often, however, he preached on the NT. As an old man, he could boast that if the Bible was a forest, then he had shaken every tree in the search for edifying fruit.
Rehearsing the history of Luther’s engagement with the Bible suggests continuity. Most fundamentally, he always encountered the text as a baptized Christian. Charged with responsibility for preaching on a regular basis (usually several times each week), biblical exegesis remained for him a spiritual exercise performed in service to God and the church, a task for which one was fitted by the Holy Spirit and by living faith, given in baptism. His career as an expositor, on the other hand, suggests movement. First, he is the celibate young friar preparing biblical lectures in rhythm with the religious life of the cloister. Later, he is the married Hausvater leaving home early in the morning to meet a group of eager students, teaching them the Bible, and exhorting them to lives of heroic faithfulness through service in the emerging Protestant ministry. Within this changing and sometimes chaotic context, his classroom exposition slowly evolved from monastic meditation on the “sacred page” (sacra pagina) —in which prayer and exegesis were inseparable—toward something more akin to modern university lectures.
Asked how to pray, Luther showed his indebtedness to the sacra pagina, instinctively directing his questioner to the Bible. Prayer is human address to God, centered in the Spirit- inspired application of all one’s powers to the biblical text, searching for authentic spiritual illumination. This illumination is inevitably followed, however, by testing, the trials faced by the struggling Christian. These trials drive one back to prayer, back to the text, and so on, in a lifelong cycle of prayer, meditation, and temptation (oratio, meditatio, tentatio). As the Holy Spirit works in unfailing agreement with Christ, the Word of God, so spiritual experience is tethered to the word in Holy Scripture. The consistent linkage between prayer and Scripture is one of the important links between Luther’s biblical interpretation and the patristic traditions of “spiritual exegesis.”
Nevertheless, Luther also insisted that interpretation centers on the plain meaning of the text (sensus literalis). Understanding requires attention to biblical languages and to history, a conviction he shared with other early modern biblical humanists. Indeed, working with the Wittenberg translation team, what he called his “Sanhedrin,” he translated the entire Bible from Greek and Hebrew into German, a process that necessitated careful attention to grammar and history in order to discern the sense of the text. However, translation, and with it interpretation, is a distinctively Christian task, a work of the Spirit and of the mind shaped by Christian truth. Grammatical and historical knowledge alone are insufficient. Translation and interpretation depend on understanding not only the words of Scripture (verba) but also the substance (res scripturae sacrae). The reader dare not bracket out Christian beliefs when grappling with a difficult text, either for translation or for interpretation.
Luther often spoke negatively of allegorical interpretation, but his own exegesis remained strikingly sensitive to allegorical and tropological resonances in Scripture, particularly those that could be applied to Christ and faith. The sensus literalis is Christ, for the Scriptures are the “swaddling cloths” in which the Christ- child is laid. Interpretation is christocentric because the text unfailingly witnesses to the redemption accomplished by Christ. The exegete searches out the interpretation that emphatically urges Christ the Savior (was Christum treibet). Theological exegesis means interpretation in harmony with the loving purposes of the triune God, revealed in the Son’s assumption of our humanity, his passion, and resurrection. “Therefore, if the adversaries press the Scriptures against Christ, we urge Christ against the Scriptures” (LWorks 34:112). Luther is not speaking hyperbolically. Nor is christocentric interpretation based on the imposition of a presupposition somehow external to the text. To the contrary, it is founded on who God is and on the Christian’s experience of God in faith. In its central witness to Christ, moreover, the Bible is clear, and it authenticates its message without dependence on external human authority.
As a reader of the biblical narratives, Luther was remarkably observant and inventive, generously applying a kind of sanctified common sense when attempting to understand the behavior of the characters in biblical stories. He relied extensively on the remarkably thorough exegetical helps developed by his predecessors, particularly the patristic and medieval commentary tradition. Luther felt a deep kinship not only with biblical heroes and heroines, but also with the living tradition of Christian believers who were their faithful followers, the commentators. Together, these saints witnessed to Christ not only by means of their doctrine, but also in their very lives as God shaped them in living faith. One comes to truly understand their stories just as the church fathers did, through prayer, study, and the experience of judgment and grace (law and gospel). Faith, Scripture, and the authentic Christian experience reflected both in the Bible and in the church’s exegetical traditions thus illumine one another. This happens in the interplay between the struggle for faith on the part of the living, and the witness of the faithful dead extending in unbroken succession from Adam and Eve down to the present day.

Bibliography

Luther’s Works, ed. J. Pelikan and H. Lehmann. American Edition. 55 vols. Concordia/Fortress, 1955–; Bornkamm, H. Luther and the Old Testament, trans. E. W. and R. C. Gritsch, ed. V. I. Gruhn. Fortress, 1969; Ebeling, G. Evangelische Evangelienauslegung. Chr. Kaiser, 1942. 3d ed. Mohr/Siebeck, 1991; Hagen, K. Luther’s Approach to Scripture as Seen in His “Commentaries” on Galatians, 1519–1538. Mohr/Siebeck, 1993; Kooiman, W. J. Luther and the Bible, trans. J. Schmidt. Muhlenberg, 1961; Mattox, M. “Defender of the Most Holy Matriarchs.” Brill, 2003; Pelikan, J. Luther the Expositor. Concordia, 1959; Preus, J. S. From Shadow to Promise. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1969; Steinmetz, D. Luther in Context. 2d ed. Baker, 2002; Wood, A. S. Captive to the Word. Paternoster, 1969.
——Mickey L. Mattox

David Mitchell

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/709373#Comment_709373

I like it for the brevity and the historical overview, and the evangelical flavor of the scholarship. I use it fairly regularly.