The historic reading of 1 Tim 2

The debate about the rather challenging verses in Paul’s first letter to Timothy continues to surface at regular intervals, and it is often characterised as being between those who maintain the ‘historic’ understanding of these verses, so requiring women not to teach or have authority in church, and those who want to offer an ‘innovative’ … Continue Reading

Five essentials of Biblical Interpretation no. 4: content

I previously wrote about the first three ‘essentials’ of biblical interpretation in 2013, reposted in 2016—but never finished this series on reading scripture well and wisely. The first related to reading in canonical context, that is, attending to the place a text comes within a passage, a chapter, a book, a testament and the whole … Continue Reading

Does Scripture need the Church?

I’ve recently had two very interesting discussions on the question of whether we can interpret Scripture faithfully and look to Scripture itself to guide us, or whether we need some sort of control on interpretation by the institution of the Church. What was particularly interesting was the fact that these two conversations happened on two … Continue Reading

How does the Spirit help resolve critical questions about the Bible?

In my previous post, I highlighted the dilemma we find ourselves in when there is a dissonance between our experience of hearing God speak through Scripture and our experience of engaging in more reflective study of the same texts. I characterised these two sets of experiences as follows:   Immediacy — Delay Clarity — Ambiguity Relevance … Continue Reading