Study the Bible for yourself: advice and suggestions
As Christians, the knowledge, study and meditation of God's word should be a priority in our lives. The written Word is an inexhaustible source of revelation and support in our daily relationship with God and with others. The Word of God illuminates our path and nourishes our life, allowing us to reach the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:13).
Through reading and meditating on the Bible we enter into and deepen our dialogue with God. Through his Word God communicates with us and that is a personal communication, like the one that every human being has with another human being that is close to him. It is not only a matter of imposing norms and doctrines to which the human being must agree.
The instrument par excellence of human communication is language, similarly, the revelation of God is personal communication and its privileged instrument is the inspired word. "The Bible is the word of God to the people of God to be shared", (Luis A. Schökel) and I would like to add, to be meditated, studied and prayed.
Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas, quod tendas anagogía.
[The letter teaches the facts, allegory what you should believe,
The moral what you should do and anagogy what you should hope for.]
(Augustine of Dacia, Rotulus Pugillaris)
This is a well-known medieval couplet. It summarizes the four "senses" or levels of meaning that Scripture had for medieval theologians. The doctrine of the fourfold sense of Scripture is first documented in John Cassian. Although it is an old approach, I believe it is still useful for us today, beyond the difficulties that the differentiation between the last three levels may present, it states that the first thing is to question the biblical text for the immediate sense of the words, the literal sense. Once this is done, we can move on to the allegorical, tropological and anagogical interpretation of the text we are studying.
The allegorical interpretation asks for the truth of the faith about Christ contained in the text. The tropological (=moral) interpretation underlines the norms of Christian behavior contained in the text. How the Christian should live. Finally, the anagogic (=scatological) interpretation looks for clues in the text about how the community of the redeemed will be in the Kingdom of God. The objective of this method of studying the Scriptures is to relate as much as possible the statements of the Scripture to all fields of human life. To bring Scripture closer to the daily life of the believer so that it becomes incarnate in the daily life of the Christian community.
Thus, in one way or another, all these levels of understanding of the biblical text must be present in our study of God's word. This will make our study profitable for us and the community in general not only on an intellectual level but also on the practical level of daily life and relations with the wider community.
By way of a brief outline I will list some basic steps in any textual analysis. The aim is not, of course, the analysis that a scholar would do on the original texts but simply to understand the text and its implications for us, Christians of the beginning of the 21st century.
Reading and understanding of the text
The first thing you should keep in mind is the importance of understanding what you are reading. For this reason, it is essential that you take a few minutes to read carefully and attentively the text proposed for study.
If necessary, read it two or three times and make sure you fully understand all the words and expressions in the text. Use a dictionary or Bible commentary to look up anything you don't know. Once you have grasped the general idea of the text and are able to briefly state what it is about, you are ready to continue with the study.
Text backdrop
Who is the author of the text?
Who the text is addressed to?
When it was written?
What literary genre the text belongs to?
In what historical-cultural context it was written?
Analysis of the content
The analysis of the content of the text is based on three aspects:
A) Theme of the text
In order to correctly enunciate the subject, it is crucial to have previously read the text carefully. We must be able to summarize the central theme of the text as briefly as possible, if possible, in a single sentence.
B) Argument of the text
It is the summary of the main points of the text that allow us to establish the theme.
C) Structure of the text
In other words, we must indicate how the content is distributed throughout the text.
Analysis of the form
The analysis of form is perhaps one of the most complex sections, since it is now that the description of the literary resources present in the text is carried out and how these resources help towards the goals of the author.
Firstly, they are identified, classified and, finally, an attempt is made to find out why the author makes use of that particular figure of speech and what he wants to convey to us through its use. To do all this, the analysis of the rhetorical resources can be organized in several categories:
- Morphological resources: How the adjectives are used, if there is an abundance of verbs that indicate a frenetic activity or, on the contrary, they hardly appear and, therefore, the text has a slower and more descriptive character, etc.
- Syntactic resources: anaphora, asyndeton, hyperbaton, enumeration, polysyndeton or reduplication are some of the stylistic resources that should be analyzed at the syntactic level of the text.
- Semantic resources: comparison, hyperbole, metaphor, personification, synesthesia, etc.
Bible writers use all these resources to better convey the message they want to communicate. Certainly, the study of them is useful but at the level that we are going to carry out our biblical study it will not be necessary to spin so fine. In addition, in any Bible commentary you can find this information.
Conclusion
Finally, to finish the study of the text, it is necessary to make a conclusion in which the most relevant aspects are included.
The essential thing is to be able to bring together in a single paragraph the ideas we have extracted from the text and our personal impression of them. Trying to find a practical application of what we have learned for our daily life.
Of course, it goes without saying that the first step in our study of the Word of God will be to seek and ask for the help of the Holy Spirit, His guidance and direction in understanding the message that God wants to convey to us through the words that we read.