Thursday, March 13, 2008
IDEA: Whether we're reading a love letter or the Bible, we not only ask questions to observe what we read but also to interpret what we read.
PURPOSE: To help people understand the difference between observation and interpretation.
Years ago in the New York Times, there was an advertisement for Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book." It pictured a teenager reading his first love letter. The blurb was, "How to read a love letter."
The copy said this:
"This young man has just received his first love letter. He may have read it three or four times, but he is just beginning. To read it as accurately as he would like, would require several dictionaries and a good deal of close work with a few experts of etymology and philology.
"However, he will do all right without them.
"He will ponder over the exact shade of meaning in every word, every comma. She has headed the letter Dear John. What, he asks himself, is the exact significance of those words? Did she refrain from saying Dearest because she was bashful? Would My dear have sounded too formal?
"Jeepers! Maybe she would have said, Dear so-and-so to just about anybody.
"A worried frown will now appear on his face, but it disappears as soon as he really gets to thinking about the first sentence: she certainly wouldn't have written that to just anybody.
"And so he works his way through the letter, one moment perched blissfully on a cloud, the next moment huddled miserably behind an eight-ball. It has started a hundred questions in his mind. He could quote it by heart. In fact, he will—to himself—for weeks to come."
The advertisement continues:
"If people read books with anything like the same concentration, we'd be a race of mental giants."
To which we could add, if we would read the Bible with anything like the same concentration, we could be a church of spiritual giants.
I. How does that illustration reflect what we are doing in Bible study?
One of the things you see is that he is reading the letter very, very carefully, and he is asking a number of questions.
There's a great deal of wisdom and benefit that comes from asking good questions of the text.
Where do you think he was reading the letter?
Do you think it took him time to do so?
How many times would you imagine that he read it?
Do you think he had other things he might have done with his time? How do you think he found time to read it?
As he reads the letter, what does he do as he studies it closely? He asks a number of questions.
II. Are there different kinds of questions he might be asking of this letter that he received? What kinds of questions are there?
There are some questions he asks just to observe what is being written to him. There are other questions that he asks about what she meant. What would some of those questions be?
III. Bible study consists of asking questions.
Some questions are used simply to observe what is in the text.
Other questions are used to interpret what is in the text.
The first group of questions are usually: This is what the writer said. The second group of questions get at: This is what the writer meant.
That's the second stage we are entering. We've been talking about observation. Now we want to talk about interpretation.