Marginal Christianity

Herma and Herman Neutics on Reading from the End Perhaps you've been told not to jump ahead and read the end of a story, particularly a whodunit because it spoils the reading experience. And that mostly true, I suppose. But I heard Herma say one day, "You know, everything I need to know about the Bible is in Revelation 21-22." "Surely you jest," I replied. "No," she said, "not really. Maybe a little exaggeration but I think its true." "Okay, I'll bite," replied Herman. "What do you mean?" 'It's pretty simple, really. We don't read the Bible primarily for aesthetic enjoyment (though we should probably do more of that than we do). We read it to gain some kind of direction or insight into faithfully for God, right? Well, then, our reading will be rather aimless until we know what God is doing and where God is taking us and history. Only if we know what God's up to can we live with ...

3. From End to Beginning You can’t read the story right unless you know where it is going. Our school teachers may have warned us against reading the end of the story first to avoid having to read the rest of it. None of us want to read the end of a mystery first. That destroys the pleasure of reading it through and trying to figure out the ending. Yet even if we heed this warning, once we have read the end and see how things work out, the rest of the story makes better, deeper sense and we recognize some of what we missed along the way that that becomes clear at the end. The Bible can be read from beginning to end. However, without knowing the end of the story, it is easy for us to be misled by other factors that impact and shape the way we think into misreading it. We’ll look at some of that distorting influence here and more on it in ch.6 on Filters). I propose them we start from the end, the every last vision of the Bible found in Revelation 21-22. John the Seer behold...