...do theological colleges spend so much time teaching verse by verse exegesis?
Why not use that time to teach students how to extract the big idea from a passage and how to understand the passage in the context of it's book?
The word by word, verse by verse details aren't going to be much use to anyone if the bigger picture can't be seen.
I absolutely couldn't agree more. Turgid exegesis, even when taught by good teachers, is still turgid.
ReplyDeleteI've come away from a 3 year M Div and haven't even looked at some books of the Bible. I spent a few hours on Daniel, barely looked at Revelation and haven't a clue what's going on in 2 Corinthians.
If we spent less time parsing verbs and more time in getting the big picture for every book then I'd feel much less like I'm starting from scratch each time I open up a book we didn't look at.
Turgid. What a great word. I'm going to use it tomorrow. Somehow.
ReplyDeleteAny question that starts, "Why do theological colleges…" is unlikely to end well for me, but I'll try to be constructive :P
ReplyDeleteHere's the thing: passages don't tend to have one big idea. That's a teaching technique which we use in preaching (and which I imagine you've used in all you other teaching experience), but which God didn't use in the Bible.
Also, I think (at least in Sydney) our problem's not with seeing the relationship between the verses, chapters, books, testaments, and biblical theology. It's moving from the text to the detail of real, contemporary life in a way that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, incisively addresses the heart and mind. It's theological ethics which gives way to practical ethics. And those are difficult skills which would be worth spending more time on at Bible college. (Rather than, say, jamming Greek in the short-term memory. But I'm a minority voice on that.)
Oops, I wrote that before seeing the other contributions. Glad to see Al's with me on the Greek :) For some reason I thought you had a penchant for Biblical studies, Al.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I also like the word 'turbid'. Many things, of course,are both.
Stuart. Sorry about the whingy/blamey way that post started.
ReplyDeleteIf we had theology taught by biblical studies lectures do you think we'd have more profound application?
I appreciate the careful approach to exegesis I was taught by my lecturers at college.
ReplyDeleteBut I wonder why the ACT demands that I do so much of it. Once you're taught a healthy approach to exegesis you probably can get away with a couple of exegesis subjects, not four for both OT and NT
Plus I had great preaching modeled to me every week, which reflected that approach to exegesis. There's an approach to the text that has become somewhat ingrained...
Because of the amount of 'bible' stuff I feel like I missed out on ethics, philosophy, pastoral stuff and spiritual formation...
Simone,
ReplyDeleteSorry, I seem to have misrepresented myself. I am very whingey about and critical of theological colleges — that's why it's not going to end well :) I'm trying to repent; hence the restraint. (So quick disclaimer
Also, I'm very sceptical about the value of a lot of Biblical studies: it often seems to be the accretion of meaningless detail at the expense of heeding the word of God. (Again, minority voice.)
I agree with Jeff that exegesis is primarily a skill, a technique. Once you've learned it, you insert the text, crank the handle, and out it comes.
(For most of us, the real skills we need involve critically reading the commentators, and knowing when what they're saying about the tense of the Greek verb is bunkum because that's just not how any language works, but I digress.)
So yeah, I want more time spent on integrative thinking in systematics in general and and ethics in particular.
Oops, forgot the disclaimer: I'm thankful to God for the fact that so many people want to go to Bible college, and for the fact that they learn some useful stuff there. I'd just love to see them learn some other useful stuff, too.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it is to get these foreign, ancient languages into the head -- so the future teacher is trained to attend to the text rather than what one might prefer to find there.
ReplyDeletereyalpeleluku - I guess I'd question whether so much training in vs by vs exegesis is the best way to do this. I think future teachers need to be taught to see how the larger animal that is the text - written in chapters and books - moves. I'm a fan of learning greek and hebrew (and used to have some greek myself) but just think the nitty gritty verse by verse stuff is a bit useless if the bigger picture can't be put in place.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to my blog! Who are you? Where are you from? You're blog doesn't tell us much.
Don't scare me like that again!
ReplyDeleteI shall have to behave, I suppose, now that my father has discovered my online search history.
I'm worried about where you'll appear next, now.
Hi again -- the way I see it is that, for better or worse, the verses make up the chapters, etc, etc (big insight, I know). I'm all for reading Greek chapter by chapter (which I do on the train -- for Hebrew I'd need an iron lung), yet I think a thorough grounding in the nitty gritty of the language should do nothing but make a person more able to read chapters at a go, with better understanding. (BTW -- Are there theological colleges that spend too much time on exegesis? Do they ignore the other stuff?)
ReplyDeleteRe me -- I'm a ukulele player.
I agree that ancient languages can help some people, but I don't think most people can get closer to the meaning with a foreign text than they can with several translations into a language in which they're fluent.
ReplyDeleteMost Australians seem to have little exposure to learning foreign languages (let alone dead ones), and so have poor language-learning skills. I'm a fairly natural linguist and have had some training and experience in translation. But at Bible college I quickly saw that I wasn't going to be able to get a lot of value out of Greek or Hebrew without making a significant and sustained effort. If it was something I was more interested in, I could specialize and become properly proficient. But as I've indicated, I'm sceptical about Biblical studies :P
For most people, though, I think it's a waste of time because (a) they don't have the gifts and experience in language learning to get great insight out of the text (i.e. more than they could get out of reading two commentaries), and (b) there's other stuff to do at Bible college. (Hence the need for a bit of philosophy of language and critical skills for reading commentaries.)
This is interesting. Does anyone mind if I use this as a place to start sorting out some of my thoughts on this?
ReplyDeleteI'm a student at <a href="http://qtc.edu.au>QTC</a>, about to enter 3rd year.
The problem for me in commenting on this issue is, I don't know what it is that Simone is reacting against. Is my college like the ones that she's reacting against? I doubt it. I imagine that there's more time spent in understanding the movement of a passage at QTC.
I think doing the hard thinking about how this passage affects people IS an exegesis issue. Exegesis that doesn't take into account the personal affect that Paul intended to have on those who hear him, or that a prophet intended to have on his hearers, or Qoheleth, etc, is not exegesis it's comprehension.
So I wonder if the 'real world thinking' that Stuart so greatly desires in preaching is truly a part of the exegesis, not simply the application section. Am I making sense? It makes sense in my head.
Exegesis is something where you just crank the handle and it comes out??? Sorry, I just don't see that at all. I can't really disagree with a subjective experience, but theologically and experientially I can't see how you can say that it's true. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong, I like discussion and correction(when I can swallow my pride. Which is sometimes.).
I imagine that there's more time spent in understanding the movement of a passage at QTC.
ReplyDeleteReally? Why do you imagine that?
Well, like I said, I don't know the scene that Simone's reacting to, so I can only go on impressions. QTC doesn't spend masses of time on verse-by-verse exegesis. At least, not in my estimation. There is definitely plenty of time dedicated to working through the text as it moves and flows and how this will work its way out in preaching.
ReplyDeleteHence, if my estimation is similar to Simone's, then compared to what she's experienced, QTC would have more time spent on the movement of the passage.
Make sense?
I guess for me, I think of 'exegesis' as 'saying what the text originally said'. It's the art of explaining, rather than interpreting the text. The rest ('what the text says today') is hermeneutics and ethics.
ReplyDeleteWhat exegesis looks like, then, is a lot of detail about the semantic range of words in the original language, some cultural insights, arguments from the flow of logic, and so on. It's what you'll see in a technical commentary (like, say, the Word series). If you're writing a new commentary and you strike a difficult patch, your task is to say what everyone before you has said, and then plump for one (or your own) take on what the text says.
When I say you just 'crank the handle', what I mean is that once you have your methodology in place (grammatico-historical, say), then the task is fairly simple. Of course, this doesn't mean that your methodology is simple. For example, there are decisions to make about how much you reconstruct a world (and worldview) around various texts, and how much you allow your reconstruction to colour your reading. Check commentaries on Colossians or Hebrews, for example, to see how commentators give you a Sitz-im-Leben and then rely on their posited reconstruction to guide their reading, and so end up with very different results.
Obviously systematics and biblical theology can shape your grid, too. Since you mention him, Ecclesiastes is one of the best examples where people's presuppositions about the whole text shape what they think individual verses say. And yes, of course there's a recursive relationship between the book and the verses; blah blah.
But all of this process is building the machine, if you like, not cranking the handle.
Once you've cranked the handle, though, you're still left with, "This is what the text originally meant" (whatever sophisticated nuances you might want to give that statement). Of course, this is a very important skill to learn, and I want Bible-teachers to be able to do it.
It's the movement from there — from the original readers to us; from authorial intent for them to authorial intent for us — which is the tricky bit. (And for me, I spent painful hours at Bible college doing verse-by-verse exegesis, which ate time which I think could have been spent on the other stuff. But not everyone will feel that way!)
In practice, I suspect most Bible-teachers are going to spend some time reading, praying about, and talking about the passage. They'll read a couple of commentaries. Doing a hack translation from the original language probably won't itself give them greater insight into the text (after all, they're not specialists and don't know the original languages that well — not just the NT, say, but the whole corpus of roughly contemporary literature). But their translation may force them to slow down and pay attention to the text itself. But the same effect could be achieved by reading multiple translations. Or you know, by just slowing down and paying attention to the text itself.
The question remains about the value of torturing everyone with the same amount of original-language study :/
Hey Stuart, thanks for responding.
ReplyDeleteIt's just a funny way of thinking to me. Perhaps it's because I'm only a student at this point, but for me I'm continually doing things that you would describe as 'building the machine' as a part of what I would describe as exegesis. Because, as you alluded to, it's an iterative process.
Perhaps I'm just using 'exegesis' incorrectly.
A question, which I think gets to the heart of what I don't understand: What exactly is it about exegesis that you're saying is just 'cranking the handle'? What does it not require that other activities do?
Perhaps another question.
ReplyDeleteTo what category of Biblical exploration belong many of the perhaps psychological thoughts of Tim Keller in The Prodigal God. Are they exegetical or application?
The only 'training' I've ever had is the very, very short-term stuff of NTE. But we always spent time learning how to figure out the big picture of a passage (usually by making a first-impression 'hypothesis', then analysing it verse-by-verse).
ReplyDeleteI think word-by-word, verse-by-verse stuff is especially important in some parts of the bible where translators have not translated a word very well, or where the english version does not give quite the same impact/idea as the original, and an understanding of the original is beneficial to understanding the whole pictures.
*pouts because no-one's helping him work out stuff*
ReplyDeleteSit tight. I resurrect these questions in a new post.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I didn't think I could say much more and be much clearer. I think for me to be clearer, it would require sitting down with some texts with you and showing you what I mean. Sorry I'm not a better explainer :(
ReplyDeleteOn Keller, I haven't read The Prodigal God, but I've checked a few reviews and it sounds like it's similar to his preaching style. All that stuff is application for me. It's finding principles (sometimes/mostly) from the text which are true and applying them to the neuroses of contemporary New York, or perhaps the other way around: starting with neuroses and asking, "Which truths of Scripture might we apply in a healing way to these? And which stories illustrate those truths?".
I haven't listened to Keller extensively (maybe 20 talks or so), but he seems to do less 'magical' application than, say, Driscoll (who comes up with some great concrete applications, but sometimes you feel like you've moved a long way from the text. Whether this is a good idea or not is a whole other discussion about what preaching should be and do).
That is, since both 'psychologizing' and NYC are fairly recent inventions, they're not in the original text (which I think is what exegesis examines). But as you say, it might just be a question of the definition of exegesis.
Thought this post from Tim Chester might suggest some interesting directions for this discussion: http://timchester.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/thursday-review-hauerwas-on-matthew
ReplyDeleteThanks Stuart. Chester is stimulating isn't he.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's great to see that an attempt is being made to publish commentaries which are deliberately theological rather than exegetical.
Vanhoozer on Jeremiah could be interesting.
"Your comment will be visible after approval"
ReplyDeleteWhat the?