Get Your Copy Today!

Posted by mike On July 29, 2009

My photography book Where Skies Burn is now available on Lulu.com and Amazon Marketplace. Lulu even offers a few-page preview. This is a collection of some of my favorite pics from my year living in Namibia. I did all the photography and design myself so it's almost like having me sitting on your coffee table! Donate to my starving artists fund by picking up your copy today. Show it off to all your friends, or better yet, buy one for all your friends. They'll love you for it! Thanks for your support. I know you'll enjoy it!

Where Skies Burn cover

Two original meanings

Posted by mike on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 12:57 PM
The advantage for you, my reader, of following along while I'm in seminary is that you get to experience much of my learning without having to read all the books or write all the papers. This morning was my first Gospels class, where the professor brought out some excellent points about understanding the original meaning of a text. Now I'm sure you're no stranger to the idea of seeking out what the author (say Luke) was trying to communicate to the original readers (Theophilus). But in the case of the gospels, you're involved with narrative stories. Therefore you have two original meanings. First, you have the original meaning to those who were historically involved in the story. But then you also have the meaning to the original readers. For example, in Luke 9:23, Jesus tells the disciples, "If anyone would come after me he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me." At this point in history Jesus had not died yet (obviously) so to his disciples the cross would be considered a criminal's torturous death. However, by the time Luke had written this passage, the original readers (and all those after them) already knew of Jesus' death on the cross, so his reference to 'taking up our cross' would have been a glaring reference to the cross of Christ and added a whole new level of meaning. So the original meaning is two-fold, first to the historical audience, and second to the reading audience, but both are still the original meaning. So in our interpretation of narrative in the Bible, it can help add to our understanding of the text if we take into account what the original readers knew, but the historical audience didn't. Pretty basic, but pretty cool.

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