Cornerstone Curriculum, Official Certification Edition - Mentor's Guide

M E N T O R N O T E S / 7 5

Bible Interpretation The Three-Step Model

L E S S O N 2

Welcome to the Mentor’s Guide for Lesson 2, Bible Interpretation: The Three-Step Model . The overall focus of this lesson is to provide the students with an effective, workable, and time honored approach to biblical interpretation that will allow them to grow in their skills of exegesis. You will introduce the students to the fundamental principles underlying a critical approach to the Bible, but not an approach which either encourages skepticism or over-reliance on scientific methods and approaches. As mentioned in the previous lesson, apart from the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, no biblical interpreter can possibly understand the mind and thoughts of God on any subject, let alone his divine purpose for salvation in Christ Jesus (1 Cor. 2.9-16). We do, however, require an approach to Scripture that is neither haphazard nor arbitrary. The Three-Step Model is designed to help your students come to grips with their need for such an approach, and become effective at using it. In some ways, this model is not new, but is an extension and expansion of the most basic principles in the interpretation of Scripture recognized by evangelical scholars for many years. The first principle is the importance of literal interpretation , which essentially means that the words and sentences of the Bible ought to be understood, first of all, in their normal sense , unless of course, such a sense does not make any sense! With the help of philological and linguistic aids, our goal is to read the Bible like any other book of literature, that is, that we seek to understand the words as they are understood in normal communication. The Three-Step Model takes seriously the power of language as God’s vehicle to communicate with us through his Son and the Holy Spirit, and it affirms the precedence within the Scriptures itself that OT prophecies were interpreted as literally true in passages such as Psalms 22, Isaiah 7.14, and Micah 5.2. You will notice, too, that the structure and nature of language is taken seriously by the Three-Step Model , in other words, it pays close attention to the grammatical relationships between the terms of a text , and how the actual words function syntactically in relationship to one another. The model affirms the “verbal plenary” understanding of inspiration, which asserts that both the words (verbal) and the entirety of Scripture (plenary) are fully inspired by the Holy Spirit, and as such we must attend to the precise wording of the text as well as the whole of it. The

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