I was chatting with my Uncle Eric earlier today and had asked him where he got his deep insights into God’s word and he wrote some tidbits of wisdom into the IM window and I just had to share:

“Part of it is that I just read an awful lot. I also try to place myself in the place and culture and circumstance of a passage and let that tell me what areas I am just ignorant of and where I need to do more research. Until my knowledge of a situation can actually animate the characters and speak the words, I know I haven’t got the right information on the background. All too often we let our modern American preconceptions animate the characters and their motives.”

And later in the conversation:

“The thing lacking in our protestant hermeneutic is historical imagination. I don’t mean the wild, guessing kind. I mean the ability to drop ourselves into a situation and imagineer it into reality so that some interpretations are rejected out of hand, and others are cultivated until the real one is coaxed out.”

Good stuff, I thought. In short we need to think about what we do know so that we can begin to dig deeper into what we don’t know.