Thoughts and Amusings

I have recently been very fortunate to acquire a copy of Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuarts copy of How to Read the Bible for all its worth. An excellent book that I have been reading over and over (and I think is probably worth a lot more than the Velvet Elvis phenomena currently sweeping the Evangelical 20something church). Anyway, a really interesting quote that I want to bring to the discussion board

' a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or his or her readers This is why exegesis must always come first ...This rule does not always help one find out what a text means, but it does help to set limits as to what it cannot mean.' (3rd ed, p.74, 2003)

1) After reading this I really was made to reconsider how much of the teaching and study I have done has been culturally appropriated to 21st century westerndom that frankly shared little to do with the biblical context or the author of the text would have had no idea about and

2) Whether as Christians 1) is a product of post modernism and deconstruction or is it just a product of the fact that we don't know how to read the text as a whole, by which I mean we read the bible in snippets rather than reading books as books and letters as letters.