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

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.