Dr. Hermen Eutic

Hi everyone

Great to be with you last Sunday. For those who missed -- we had 18 present, started and ended with prayer and sharing, and began a conversation based on the article Four Concepts for Reference, archived in this blog Thursday September 20 2007.

We talked a good deal about the relationship of "fact" and "truth" in understanding the Bible. The general drift is that what we are most interested in is "truth" in the sense of meaning -- what God is saying to us, and how to apply this to our lives.

I enjoyed our opening community builder -- sharing about the place we lived when we were ten years old, and a significant experience had in that time and place. This connected with the beginning of our discussion, identifying that our different backgrounds have a bearing on what we understand the Bible to be, and how we read and interpret it. To that end I suggested the image of glasses -- that as we all have different prescriptions (and some lucky ones none!) we all "see" the Bible a little bit differently. In assuming this we also assume that we can learn by seeing through each other's "lenses"; though it is vital to understand our own lenses and how they influence our reading of Scripture. We also learned a fancy word, 'hermeneutic', which is a 'principal of interpretation' . . . what we're talking about is that we all have one, and they vary quite a bit from person to person.

We left off at the beginning of the second paragraph of the article; we'll pick up with some discussion of the concepts of "mythos" and "logos".

We'll aim to finish this conceptual discussion on Sunday, then move on to more Bible study!

Hope to see you all this Sunday, November 16. BTW it's "Bible Presentation Sunday", where 3rd and 9th graders and few others will receive wonderful study Bibles -- those are the ones that have been on the counter eavesdropping on our class the last few weeks. So please send prayers of blessing on those books as they soon will, we hope, touch the lives of some of our children and youth.

We appreciate you! Thanks for being in this class and being such a blessing to us.

Dan and Laura