Details 4.18.2024

     Last week we spoke about symmetry or balance. The next step is to link that symmetry with a solid respect for the details. Hermeneutics is composed of several related disciplines.  We want to do a thorough exegesis of the text. This requires familiarity with grammatical, syntactical, and discourse concepts of the original languages. Understanding languages, particularly ancient languages, is undergirded by a preliminary examination of the cultural, social, anthropological, and micro-historical processes that produced the society whose language is being studied and the specific people-group or organization (in our case, the earliest Church) that used that language.  And ultimately, we want to preach a message in recognizable colloquial English to our congregation.  The Hermeneutical task is not finished until the truth we learn is communicated to our congregation.

    This requires many detailed questions and accumulates a lot of data. For example, we ask questions like “How is the use of the term ἐκκλησία in the NT similar and different from the ways it was used in secular Greek?” This can be a daunting question. Here is a simple table taken from a Logos Word Study on ἐκκλησία.

Corpus                 Date                          Results

LXX           3rd/2nd Century      100 in 96 verses

New Testament     1st Century             114 in 111 verses

Apostolic Fathers     1st/2nd Century     89 in 77 verses

NT Apocrypha                                1 in 1 verse

Greek Classics                                  950 in 869 verses

     appreciate all that data, but it comes with risk. The risk of getting so buried in the details that one loses grasp of the forest whilst examining the trees. We have to become very good at determining as quickly as possible which of the details are relevant. Using the above table; The Classic citations are historically interesting but most come from materials that fall outside of the period of the “koine” or “common Greek.” There is only one citation from Apocrypha, not enough to draw any conclusions. So, we have eliminated 951 uses of the term without turning a page. The relevant questions that help determine how one wades through these details are: 1. Did the LXX use of the term “determine” how NT authors used it? 2. Did the Apostolic Fathers use the term the same way the NT authors did, along with the sub-question, how many of the citations in the Fathers are quotations, or allusions to the New Testament? In the end, the detailed work that needs to be done is comparing the LXX with the NT to determine the level of influence that the LXX exerts on the NT. 

    And there’s more! Consider this secondary issue. The papyri. There is a vast amount of data, from the same era in which the New Testament was written that is difficult to catalog and compare. You can do it. Most likely not by Sunday. This is where our lexical tools come into play. Now, for NT lexicography BDAG (Arndt, William, Frederick W. Danker, Walter Bauer, and F. Wilbur Gingrich. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.)  is the star of the show. And, as one would expect, the article is large, 7 pages. Yielding the following (I generalize) uses, Regularly summoned assembly, casual assembly, congregation, local assembly, and the universal Church. That is a lexical summary of the NT and early Christian literature. Another useful tool is Moulton & Milligan (Moulton, James Hope, and George Milligan. The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930.) This lexical tool defines NT terms in light of the usage in the Papyri. In other words, it solves the data overload problem. For the word in question, ἐκκλησία, M&N also adds the specific nuance that in the first century the Latin-speaking West did not translate the term—they adopted it as their own. This detail is significant. At the time the NT was written everyone knew what ἐκκλησία meant: an assembly. The LXX and the NT seem to follow common usage until it is invested with specific Christian meaning. 

    The ultimate question then, in the context of preaching.“What does the Bible say about the assembly of God’s people?”  With the follow-up,  "How much of what the Bible says about the Church is merely organizational minutia, and how much is “theologically laden?” The details matter because they contribute to our understanding, not just of a term, but the use of the term in context. We don’t merely preach words and their definitions. We preach the text which is constructed out of those linguistic pieces. 

    A preacher who is exegeting Matthew 16.18, or any other text that deals with the Church can summon the needed linguistic detail in minutes. This little exercise took about 15 minutes with professional-grade Biblical Studies Software. Saving time in this part of one’s study allows for other avenues of investigation. Doing fast what can be done fast is essential for symmetry. Once we are overwhelmed by the details it is very difficult to get “un-overwhelmed.” It is far better to approach our task with intent. The goal is a solid Biblical sermon. I want to balance my workload so that I know all I can about the details that best inform my trajectory through the text. Our study of the text undergirds our preaching of that text. We are teaching, exhorting, encouraging, and at times correcting. We teach what the text directs us to teach. A solid Biblical hermeneutic takes us from the study to the pulpit with as much transferable information as possible. 

    A word is in order, about the preaching trajectories we choose as we move through a text. Last Sunday I preached from Acts 2.14-36. I noted upfront, in the introduction to the sermon that this was the first text I preached as the resident of this pulpit and that I had, in total preached this text 5 times since coming to Grayville. How is that even possible? Did I simply use the same message every time? Wouldn’t someone notice? Yes, they would, I did not use the same message, and it is possible. The text tells a single story, but that story has different nuances, characters, applications, points of emphasis, and degrees of engagement. The story is always the same but our choice of which details to emphasize defines different arcs or trajectories we can take through the text in preaching. To do so you must know the details of the text. 

    A preacher needs to become proficient at moving, so to speak, in and out of the forest. Sometimes examining broader structures, other times focusing on individual trees. When we learn to do that, when we can both delve into the details and grasp the larger structures then we are able to preach with balance, not only within an individual sermon but also throughout an entire year—even an entire ministry.