Bible Students

A reflection based on “Toward an Exegetical Theology” by Kaiser (chapters 3-6)

This week’s chapters mainly cover the analysis of biblical texts. Chapter three covers the analysis of context. 

Chapter three discusses the art of contextual analysis. The reader must understand the context in order to understand the developing argument of the author. Apart from the context, the reader can not grasp the way the specific verse plays into the whole of what the author is saying. The author may state his intention somewhere else in the book. Details will develop as the argument of the book develops. 

Now, if a truth is taught in another section, but is not taught in the section at hand, it would be better to go to the other section than to teach the truth from the section at hand. The truth should not be pushed onto this section, as the listener will see this as approving of reading whatever one wants into a text. 

The whole book should be read in order to be properly understood. Books are arranged with breaks in the thought. For example, in 1 Corinthians, the book is arranged by many notes of “now concerning,” noting a specific subject that the next section will cover. 

Chapter four tackles syntactical analysis. The text must be understood to mean what it originally meant, and then that meaning must be translated to apply to a modern audience. Grammar is an incredibly important aspect of understanding what the author is attempting to say. Parallelism is often used to expound upon specific information in a text, so one should look for parallelism in order to uncover how the biblical author viewed certain ideas. Another aspect of grammatical analysis is form criticism, which attempts to reconstruct what the original text may have said. Form criticism has not had much consensus, though it can be helpful in discovering what the original author was saying. New concepts in a text will often mark a new paragraph, and so should be paid extra attention to. This is because paragraphs form the basic unit of understanding, giving the context for the idea presented. 

Chapter gives covers more ways of discecting the text. First, figures of speech are incredibly important to understanding the biblical authors, as they are used frequently throughout the Bible. One easy way to tell if something is a figure of speech is if an inanimate object is described as animate. For example, mountains jumping would be a figure of speech. Additionally, using other passages by the same author is helpful to understand how they intended to use their figure of speech.

Using multiple passages with the same word is helpful to understand the range of meaning of this word in the Bible. Multiple passages can have the same word used in different ways, but understanding the range of the word will affect interpretation. Words are the most basic unit of meaning, though they can not be understood outside of context. 

Additionally, the biblical text should not be simply described, but brought into the present. The text should not be described as if it was something that may have happened long ago with no relevance to today. Instead, the biblical text should be described using intense, active language, in order to bring the listener into the biblical world. 

Finally, chapter six describes some ways for interpreting what the text actually means. First, the use of proof-texts while exegeting Scripture is not profitable. Proof-texts are texts where the speaker references a verse out of context in order to make a “stronger” case for their belief, without taking into account the context of the verse. 

Next, commentaries and lexicons are extremely helpful! Preachers should not reinvent the wheel every time they go to preach, but rather should draw from the vast well of thousands of years of knowledge of the Scriptures. 

Finally, one should compare the usage of biblical words in the Bible to the usage of biblical words outside the Bible. Are the words used in extrabiblical contexts? If they are, it would be profitable to understand how they are being used, in order to understand how the biblical author either affirms or changes the common usage of the word. 

Overall, these chapters aided in collecting a toolbox of do’s and don’t’s for biblical exegesis in preaching. Context is the most important textual quality, and should be paid the most attention to in every area. Apart from context, one can not exegete. Additionally, after exegeting the text, it is incredibly important to bring the text and the listener together, in order that the listener understands the text and can apply it to their life. Apart from this practice, biblical exegesis is not life changing, and therefore is not purposeful.