Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
Instead of supporting a narrative, the text becomes a set of disjointed aphorisms, to be mined for today's theology.
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What are today's texts were once oral narratives(
1). They were stories, songs, poems. So each narrative had a theme. It wasn't a set of disjointed aphorisms. (Perhaps Proverbs or Ecclesiasticus were, but typically texts were initially narratives.) "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water": it's how we remember things. The characters, the going, the landscape (a hill), the fetching, the pail and the water are all remembered for their place in the narrative.
So I suggest that "not one of His bones were broken" and "Zeal of Thy house has eaten Me up" were originally formed as part of a narrative; actually a set of narratives which made up a larger narrative (Psalms), a meta-narrative if you will. And this was set with and looked to "the Law" and "the Prophets" as a still larger story - that of, "the scripture says".
"His disciples remembered that it was written...", and "These things were written concerning Me..." in the NT narratives were in a context which (I suspect) gradually lost meaning, and narrative thrust. A new context arose, meet for today's need of Reformation or Recovery or True Remnant Church or whatever, and a new meta-narrative came forth, and then the text was only useful to support "God's New Testament Economy" or whatever they're pitching today.
So if you review their product, and the salesman (sorry, Bible expositor) says, "natural, natural, natural - eureka! A revelation of Christ! - natural, natural, natural", as they cover the text, and you wonder how far we've gone off-course, perhaps this is an initial clue, or signpost.
But the good news is that the text is still there, preserved largely in toto, waiting to speak. The story is still there. But ignoring the text as "natural" won't bring you the story.
1. Remember that Peter and the rest were called "unlettered" in Acts 4:13. Even then, the texts were known primarily orally, by the uneducated masses. Thus the narrative structure was crucial.