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Last night, at the nursing home, I started talking to man who’s been struggling for some time to keep his wife, as well as himself in good health. He began talking about yoga and Dr. Li who lived to be 256 years old and the secret to his longevity was that he was able to control his animal self, the beast within, he said. Then the topic moved to world religions. He said that all of them are pretty much the same–he said that Muslims respect Jesus greatly and that the hindu’s Krishna (god of restoration) is the same as Christ; Buddhism is also very similar.

I thought this wasn’t true. Buddhism and other religions may teach us to master the “beast within,” that we may live longer, but Christ teaches us to kill the beast, that we might live forever…

This excerpt (given in class as a handout) articulated well the many hermeneutical problems that have faced the church for centuries. However, like most of the cast studies presented in the book, this introduction did not give a resolution; it gave hard to follow rules.

The author’s proposed reformation of hermeneutics sounds great, but at the end of the day, it’s a lot of hard work and boils down often to conjecture, sometimes more, sometimes less. His idea was that we need a firm understanding of 1) the cultural context that the Bible was written in (this is compounded by the fact the Bible, being written over a period of thousands of years, is written in a multitude of cultural contexts; 2) the cultural context in which the gospel is to be presented; and 3) the Bible itself. At the outset, this idea seems to rip the intelligible Bible out of the hands of the people, placing it instead in the hands of scholars. However bad and historically repetitious this proposition sounds to me, I really can’t think of another way the Bible, the gospel, or God is to be understood. Continue reading →