Grasping God's Word

Conclusion — Can We Be Objective?

Always identify purpose/result statements. These are phrases or sentences that describe the reason, the result, or the consequence of some action. They are frequently introduced by result-oriented conjunctions such as “that,” “in order that,” and “so that,” but they can also be introduced with the simple infinitive.

3. Explain how your particular passage relates to the surrounding sections. Now that you can see the author’s flow of thought through the entire book by reading your section summaries, it is time to look at how your passage fits into its surroundings.

dynamis (sometimes translated “power”) to illustrate a particular form of the time-frame fallacy:

The basic Interpretive Journey involves five steps:

A Brief Survey of English Translations4

It is obviously important to know just how wide the river is before we start trying to construct a principlizing bridge across it.

Finally, we caution you not to let yourself slowly evolve into nothing more than a walking database of ancient facts. Don’t lose your interpretive heart in your quest for information to deepen your understanding of the text. Keep your study of the background of the Bible in proper perspective. We study the historical-cultural context not as an end

Step 1: Grasp the text in their town. What did the text mean to the original audience? Step 2: Measure the width of the river to cross. What are the differences between the biblical audience and us? Step 3: Cross the principlizing bridge. What is the theological principle in this text? Step 4: Consult the biblical map. How does our theological prin