Of Biblical Interpretation and Reflections

Over the past two weeks, I underwent an intensive course on biblical interpretation. Allow me to share some of my reflection and learning points from the course here.

The first reflection point has to do with something my lecturer mentioned in the first day of class, which has been consistently taught to us over the two weeks – we need to be able to keep up with times and learn to reach out to a heavily digitalised world. The key thing is this, if we as Christ followers claim to have the truth, then why shouldn’t we use these media platforms, such as the internet and mass media, to share the truth? No doubt, I still believe that some traditional methods, such as meeting face to face for discipleship or evangelism, still work best, especially when there is a need to clarify on difficult issues which are best said face to face. Nevertheless, if God provides us these additional platforms, then we should take advantage and utilise them. As such, for me, it also means that I familiarise myself in the usage of mass media platforms, which was one reason why I decided to return to Facebook after a six-month fast in 2011.

The second reflection point is about the dynamics of teamwork. Given the intensive nature of the block course, the collaboration between the team members for our group projects is very important. However, I realise over the past two weeks that my approach to teamwork in class is the same as the approach I adopt in my ministry. As I reflect through, it becomes apparent that my tendency in group work is to manage everything myself, even when I make the conscious decision to trust and delegate. Perhaps one reason for this is due to the high standard I set for myself in terms of the work. Yet one question that arises in this experience (which is something that I am forced to face over the past 1.5 year) is whether I am willing to trust and let go, believing that other people in my team can produce the best work possible. I remember one fellow leader once said to me, that we should allow our team members to make mistakes, so that they can learn and grow in the process. It is exactly the same thing that God spoke to me when I was running the Sundown Marathon, when He told me that I sometimes run the race alone for too often. Translating this to ministry, I am just thinking that maybe it is time to start delegating some of the work that I have shouldering myself to other LG members.

Thirdly, after learning structural diagramming, I must say that this easily qualifies as one of the most fascinating tools I have learned this year. But more importantly, this makes me understand the importance of language in interpreting the Bible. This gives me more reasons to improve on my language capability. In some sense, as I reflect back, God was already preparing for a journey such as this over the past three years. During my undergrad days, I was not fully convinced that I needed to watch out for my language capability but this slowly creeps into my consciousness as I began to write papers for policy. Now I am learning to write papers for bible studies and theology, the process of learning structural diagramming shows me that there is still a long way to go for me to improve my capability but at least there was a start three years back. It helps me to appreciate the fascinating insights that we can obtain from structural diagramming, which prompts me to do the same thing to other Bible passages which I am reading right now.

Lastly, it is about how to make the teachings of the Bible relevant and contextualised in our discipleship today. Indeed, one important thing we learned in this course is that the readers of the Bible approach the text with a set of pre-suppositions that they have learned in their world. This is not necessarily the same as the world of the text and the world of the authors of the different books in the Bible. However, if the truths taught in the Bible are eternal, this means that we need to be able to contextualise the teachings to match the world of the readers and be able to derive relevant and appropriate application points. Perhaps it is true, that most of us who study theology focus too much on what the Bible says but do not think about the applications to our current contexts.  I myself fall victim to such an approach, even when I conduct teachings in my lifegroup meetings. However, as I reflect through, when we feed our sheep, we need to feed them with what they can chew and not what we have made. Hence, to us as disciple-makers, we will need to bear in mind that as far as we hope our theology is consistent and correct, we need to make it digestible and applicable to our audience as well.