Love before all

Matthew 22.10-40; Mark 12.28-21; John 13.31-35

I profer these Gospel verses to anyone who refutes the assertion that the message of the Gospel, the message of Christ, is love.

A thought

So while trying to escape a discussion with a crazy woman today, I had a thought about my Gospel Interpretations – Mark course. We are currently working with different methods of exegesis, and a friend of mine observed that all these methods seem to do is deconstruct, leaving us with tiny fragments with no value beyond the literary-historical. The question seems to be, how and when do we reconstruct?

So here is my thought.

The first step in looking at the Bible is deconstructive. We must look at it outside its Scriptural context and analysise it critically. Methods such as Historical, Grammatical, Form, Redaction, and Literary Criticism must be brought to bear so we can break it into it’s constituent part and analyze them, and get all the meaning out of it that we can. Then comes reconstruction, which is an exercise in theologizing. Once we have let the text speak for itself we can speak from it, and look at it Structurally and Canonically, and through our own ideological lenses. This is when we start forming opinions and theologies, not before.

Both step are crucial. If we skip the first step we are reading our own ideas into the Bible, and if we fail to complete the second step we loose the Bible’s importance as Scripture.

Thoughts?