It’s illuminating to note that the same kinds of figures of speech that occur in everyday speech and general literature are also to be found in Scripture. Examples:-
Are rather few: their place is often taken by substantives.
‘Holy Spirit of promise’ = ‘Promised Holy Spirit.’ (Eph 1:13)
Acts 7:2; 1 Thess 1:3.…
The name of John Calvin is for ever bound up with the name of the theological system that he is thought to have founded – Calvinism. He is supposed to have imposed on Holy Scripture a severe, unfeeling logic, and forced its teachings to conform to his own pre-conceived ideas. This impression can easily be corrected by recalling Calvin’s gifts as a Bible expositor – in many ways, the first modern expositor – not least of which was an insistence on letting the text speak for itself. …
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is a masterpiece of Christian writing. Indeed, it has sometimes been referred to as an example of ‘inspired’ writing, with the intention of thereby demoting the idea of biblical inspiration to that of any other insightful spiritual writing.
But this will not work. The Baptist theologian A.H. Strong (following W.H.P. Faunce) suggested that, great as it is, Pilgrim’s Progress actually falls short of scriptural teaching about the Christian life in some important ways:-
1.…
It is, perhaps, we lay preachers who are particularly prone to commit exegetical crimes, lacking as many of us do a technical grounding in the original languages of the Bible. ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ when it comes to drawing conclusions about the ‘literal meaning’ or the ‘original meaning’ of words. Here are some of the exegetical fallacies identified by D.A. Carson:-
1. The root fallacy. This based on the assumption that the meaning of a word is inevitably bound up in the ‘basic’, ‘original’, or ‘literal’ meaning of its component parts. …
N.T. Wright, in his recent book Scripture and the Authority of God, suggests some of the ways in which the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ have misread Scripture. Here are some of the items in Wright’s list:-
Misreadings of the ‘Right’
Misreadings of the ‘Left’
The ‘analogy of faith’ (an expression borrowed from Rom 12:6, but not reflecting Paul’s sense there) as a principle of interpretation ‘connotes that an obscure text or passage may be illuminated by other texts of Scripture whose meaning is clear.’ (Evangelical Dictionary of Theology)
There are two degrees of the analogy of faith
1. Positive Analogy. This consists of those teachings of the Bible that are so clearly, positively and frequently stated, that there can be no real doubt of their meaning and value. …
1. Puritan exegetes are pre-modern, in the sense that they emphasise the similarities between their culture and that of biblical times rather than the differences. They felt a kinship with biblical characters and their experiences because they belonged to the same human race, worshiped the same unchanging God, and struggled with the same spiritual problems.
2. Puritan grammatical-historical exegesis is remarkably competent, as an informed reading of Matthew Henry’s commentary demonstrates.
3. Puritans exegeted Scripture in order to apply it.…
