August 2012 – Page 3 – 300 words a day

Context: an example of Shrewd

We’ve been talking this week about looking at contexts to understand sentences in the Bible. I want to point you a just published illustration of using context: Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus. Rick Lawrence looked at a story Jesus told about a guy who, about to be fired, used the boss’s assets […]

by Jon Swanson

Context: the bigger pictures.

We’re talking about ways to understand sentences from the Bible by looking at their contexts. Yesterday we talked about looking at the book around the sentence and the other books by the same writer. Today we’ll look at a couple other contexts. Third, look at the sentence in the context of the rest of the […]

by Jon Swanson

Context: the book and the corpus.

Yesterday we starting talking about looking at particular sentences of the Bible in four contexts. First, look at the sentence in the context of the book it’s in. In the class I was teaching Sunday, we were looking at a sentence from Colossians. I suggested that we needed to look at the whole letter, not […]

by Jon Swanson

Looking at the context.

My favorite teaching is when I get to walk through part of the Bible with a group of people. It’s how I started 300 words several years ago, walking through the book of Matthew. On Sunday, I was teaching about part of the letter of Colossians. Rather than spend all of our time examining particular […]

by Jon Swanson

a word for new college students.

Sunday I taught a group of college students about a framework for interpreting a section of Colossians. Maybe I’ll teach you about it someday. At the end of class, I digressed. I said something like this: “You are heading to college this week, some of you,” I said. “You will have to choose topics and […]