Life | a divine journey through space in time

In less than 24 hours I will once again recall a year past, say: “thank you,” remind everyone of my age –celebrate my birthday, in consequence be reminded again of a milestone in my life journey that is both exciting and demanding.

As I write this my heart beats albeit restlessly because at present my journey is not what I would call ‘well.’ I have a lot of things happening and at times I honestly feel like I a twig in the middle of a whirlwind and at times it seems like I am hanging on a thread. So writing about life as a journey for me is quite difficult, partly because there’s that persistent discomfort that I myself am wishing that I’d be relieved of.

Shedding our Biases Along the Hermeneutical Spiral

A summary of Preunderstanding of the Interpreter from Klein, Bloomberg, and Hubbard’s Introduction to Biblical Interpretation

Can one approach the Scriptures without bias?

This is a fundamental question that confronts biblical interpreters, whenever they would approach the Bible, because whether we like it or not “we all have certain suppositions or assumptions of the word based upon our prior experiences based on these presuppositions”[1]. In their book Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, the authors Klein, Bloomberg and Hubbard, defined this phenomenon as preunderstanding: an occurrence upon which knowingly and unknowingly we construct a body of beliefs and attitudes that we use to interpret or make sense of what we experience[2], which according to them play a very significant role in shaping the way we construe reality –therefore functioning as an arbitrary hermeneutic that we tend to use whenever we would try to draw out meaning at a given text.

Not ‘I’ but ‘us’ | Relationship as the essence and goal of human wholeness

I remember ending my week with a goodbye that underscored a sense of lonesomeness as it means that for a time life will be lived apart from a loved one.  While, the following day I started the week with a celebration of my father’s 85^th birthday that also coincided with Father’s Day.

Thinking about it now further reinforces my conviction that our humanity if we are to look at human life it can be summed up in terms of relationships. It is in relationships that we discover ourselves and our tenacity to live and make meaning in living –because to be human is to stand in a unique relationship to God, to one another, and to all creation. This, of course is because God, as Trinity, is relational[1]. The perichoretic God[2] makes perichoretic people. God’s being-as-communion overflows in humans’ being-in-community. Therefore we as humans have no being apart from others. Humanity is co-humanity[3].

The Synthesis Between Historical Inquiry and Divine Revelation

_{A summary of Gordon Fee’s Exegesis and Spirituality: Completing the Circle, an excerpt from Listening to the Spirit in the Text}

To paraphrase the words of Gordon Fee: ‘The ultimate task of exegesis is spirituality,’ as he proposes the need for an interface between exegesis and spirituality which can be found in between the historical exercise of digging out the original intent of the text and the experience of hearing the text in the present terms of both its presupposed and intentional spirituality.

Accordingly if the goal of exegesis is spirituality it is crucial now for us to ask what spirituality is in the first place –for it is in framing it into a working definition that we start what Fee, portrays as the circle of approaching the Scripture from the vantage point of a serious exegete and a earnest followers of Christ that are seeking for a genuine encounter with the God who has revealed Himself in the Word.