Thursday 18 October 2018

The Importance of Narrative: Utilizing the Entire Bible to Train Up Well-Rounded Leaders

How does theological education think through relevancy in the 21st century?

We all have diets. We all consume different types of food habitually.

Necessarily, it would also seem that the word ‘diet’ is further popularized as many are practitioners of specialized diets, ranging from a raw food diet, to a ketogenic diet, to an Atkins diet.

For the sophisticates, diets are restricted to time combined with circadian rhythms. And if those are not good enough nor fast enough to achieve meaningful results, there are assortments of diet pills.

Diets through special restrictions have taken over the culture and makeover how we think about food and its caloric count. We are obsessed with reading packages, counting calories, and thinking about what we put into our bodies, rather than enjoying the provision, texture, and the full-goodness of food!

The Bible is a full spiritual diet, with healthy courses of narrative, history/law, prophecy, wisdom, poetry, apocalyptic, parables, gospels, and Epistles. Each diet (genre) provides nourishment for individuals, communities, and churches. A cross-sectional of diet might be seen in the liturgical practices, or reading through the Bible chronologically annually, or reading through the Bible over a period of three to five years.

But personal recent observation of the Bride in America would suggest that there might be a tendency to prefer the New Testament diet over the Old Testament, and that a Pauline diet is much more favored.

Could this be attributable to seminary courses which might lean towards the Epistles for the sake of teaching exegesis? Might it be possible that the use of Epistles lends itself towards making ‘points’? And might it be possible that the usage of digital presentations reinforces the teaching of the sacred text so that it truly ...

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