Questions behind questions or something like that...

It felt good to sit and absorb what Sara had to share this evening. I realized about half way through her talk that I would regret it if I didn't start taking notes, but I was so engaged with what she was saying that the thought hadn't crossed my mind up to that point :) It felt good to break down scripture into the original language, discuss the historical/social context of the passage and then interpret it from there. My dad is a pastor and he knows hebrew, greek, and latin so when he preaches, that's exactly what he does. He breaks it down into all the pieces (grammatically, contextually, etc.) and then builds the passage back up. I think that there is definitely something to be said about that process...perhaps we should do a little more of it.

That being said, it leaves those of us without hebrew, greek, and latin language knowledge in a bind. If we don't have the skills to break down every troublesome passage we come to, what are we to do? The "community" answer (it's so Fox, isn't it...also true, but so George Fox) is great but it doesn't really answer questions or solve problems. Even within a community is it probable that nobody knows Greek or Hebrew. Furthermore, there is a question of which passages need to be taken apart to be understood correctly and which don't. Again, unless you have been educated to do discern explicitly that, making those decisions seems daunting. Tonight brought up more, new questions that are difficult to unravel.