Category Archives: New Testament Studies

BEYOND CONFESSION: There is Life After “I Receive Jesus”

I want to introduce a way of reading or studying Scripture.

We are not simply reading words when we read Scripture or any other literary work.  We read a literary material when we read Scripture, that is, the material we read is structured (composed or arranged) a certain way.

By composition I mean to refer to different literary types in Scripture. One is narrative/historical (e.g., Exodus or Acts), another is epistolary (i.e., formal Letters that carry a central argument, e.g., Romans and Galatians). Then there is poetry (e.g., Psalms, Proverbs), and prophecy (e.g., Hosea, Revelation). Poetry is a very entertaining study, if you ask me. I like the way it gets us into the emotion of the matter.  Under poetry we study figures of speech. The simple ones include metaphor, simile, synecdoche, etc.  Then we have parallelism, where the words or thought in the first line are parallel to the words or thought in the second line. Continue reading BEYOND CONFESSION: There is Life After “I Receive Jesus”