My Task
Learning Objectives
After this section, you should be able to:
• Summarize the speaker’s three tasks in this course

To Alert
I have three tasks as it relates to our course on biblical interpretation. The first thing I am going to try to do is to alert you to various obstacles for interpreters. Believe it or not, there are a lot of things that get in the way with correct biblical understanding that really can’t be avoided, but we can alert you to them so that you know what to do, know how to think a little bit better when you do encounter some situations or you’re forced to think about certain things. To Introduce Secondly, I want to introduce you to what’s in the biblical text. Now, what I mean by that is that Bible study, hermeneutics—again, the science of interpretation—is about much more than just Bible reading. We’re going to be going through some things that I hope will train you to look carefully at the biblical text and to think carefully about what you see. To Guide Thirdly, I have the task of guiding you just generally on how to see, think, and do certain things—how to really look at the biblical text in a different way, a more intelligent way, or at least just a more careful way. There are a lot of things that you’ll encounter in the text that just go well beyond self-evident understanding that would come with simply reading the text. So what we see, how to think about what we see, and then what to do with the material—what to do with the data—is in large part what we need to be trained in. We need to exercise ourselves when it comes to hermeneutics. And toward that end, I’ll be introducing you to some tools and some resources and a few techniques to do precisely that: to gather data, think about the data, and then go about the task of interpretation.