thinking about scripture

Len Hjalmarson offers an insightful post regarding Biblical literacy.

Theology operates at two levels at once: at the level of belief systems or worldview, and at the level of particular arguments. Norman Peterson calls the first the narrative sequence, and the second the poetic sequence. Bible students always have both in mind. The former we tend to think of as the broader context of Scripture, including its cultural setting. The latter we think of as particular passages and verses.

...

When we lack ... wider context of understanding and of community, it creates a raft of problems:

* when we work from a particular passage, to the extent that we lack the ability to see the passage in the broader narrative, we distort what we see. We always see in part, and it is only honest to acknowledge this. But we will see in a much smaller part when we don’t know the wider story.
* apart from biblical literacy, we teach propositions and ideas, not theology. I recently noticed this tendency in a membership manual. Baptism was a practice anchored in the New Testament only, and even then only a few passages were referenced. As a result, baptism was abstracted to a religious ritual divorced from depth of meaning and the ongoing life of God’s covenant people.