The
Old Testament comprises a lot of writing compiled over more than a
thousand years. Old Testament theology for some seems generally to
mean developing a way to address, approach, understand or interpret
the Old Testament-as if a particular method was correct rather than
just reading the books. The application of a structured hermeneutic
to the Old Testament obviously poses certain risks of prejudgment and
error. In some respects reading and learning the Old testament
directly and letting it speak to-oneself permits the Bible as
inspired literature to inspire for-itself directly informing one's
own spirit with the living word of God.
Certainly
accurate translations of the Old Testament are a concern
in-themselves. Contemporaries may emasculate the truthful meaning and
use terms of political correctness perhaps to render political
offensive passages dead. One might anticipate evolution of Sodom and
Gomorrah into cities destroyed simply to end a pitiful
slave-condition of homosexuals or the concentration of wealth rather
than sexual immorality of homosexuality and pervasive amoeba-like
sharing of bodily fluids with everyone. Even so one may set aside the
translation concern and consider that one has a decent Bible to move
to consider that some insight from trusted, learned scholarship can
help to inform one of the nature and circumstances of the composition
and meaning of scripture. That might be called theology even though
it includes history, philosophy, linguistic, archaeology, cosmology,
sociology and numerous other fields of research. One can use theology
yet with a certain reserve trusting foremost in scripture in-itself.
It
is possible that one may take an overly-academic approach to Old
testament writing and perhaps subjectively ossify the content
for-oneself with academic technique. While one may enjoy abridging
Toynbee or memorizing the Constitution and even deconstruct
Shakespeare a little comparing him to Marlowe and his method to
play-packaging construction with blank verse workshop apprentices and
hired ghost-scriveners under his direction, that would tend to be an
over-academicized demythologizing theoretical approach to the Bard of
London and Stratford honored with the title though he wasn't Irish.
More like some sort of German-ancestry pretender to a stone throne of
Celtic muse.
One
must be cautious about assuming that an abstract reduction and
summary of Biblical text academically brings out a more full or
better understanding of the content of the O.T. Each word and each
book is an integral part of the whole. I
Consider
the numbers; each has a place in a field even of two dimensions. If
one makes an abstract of the set of natural positive whole numbers it
may comprise a learning tool, yet that tool cannot in any way
substitute for the content. While there are innumerable positive
whole numbers that one does not know and has never heard of, select
abstract concepts allow one to understand the nature of those unknown
numbers, and of course one has trust that they really exist though it
may be impossible to prove that abstract positive whole numbers
really are infinite and do not actually end someplace for some
reason-even it is simply at the point of being the highest number
that was actually ever reached, of numbers exist only in fact and
never actually in theory-that is if numbers are of existential
character rather than of a Platonic realistic nature.
