Explore the art and science of Bible interpretation, teaching you how to become a good reader of the Bible so you will hear everything God says in His inspired Word. Dr. Leithart teaches a hermeneutical approach grounded in a robust theology of language, modelled after the way Jesus and the apostles interpreted the Old Testament, and drawing on elements from patristic and medieval methods. Other crucial topics are discussed, such as the nature of texts, semantics, intertextuality, biblical allusions, and literary structure, all reinforced with a plethora of examples from both biblical and extrabiblical literature. All of this contributes to the main point of reading Scripture: to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.
“Instead of saying God accommodates Himself to our capacity, I think we simply say that God is capable of speaking human, and that He created human beings to receive the language that He speaks. He created human language itself as a vehicle for Him to reveal Himself to us.” (source)
“But the Reformation did represent a turn in interpretation, and the turn tended toward doctrinal readings, it tended toward literal historical readings, and most of all, I think it tended toward moralistic readings. What the medievals called the tropological sense of the Bible, the sense of the Bible that gave moral guidance, became the leading sense for many Protestant interpreters.” (source)
“When Enlightenment readers did read the Bible, they were looking for moral content rather than for types and shadows and figures of Jesus. Evangelicals, conservative Christians today, tend to read the Bible for its moral content, and also for its doctrinal substance.” (source)
“I think we should take the nt method of reading the ot as our model. We should learn to read the ot from the apostles and then we should try to read the entire ot from that perspective, even where the apostles never mentioned it.” (source)
“Wisdom doesn’t come by retreating from language into a silent inner space. Wisdom comes by interacting with the world with language, through language, especially through the language that God has spoken.” (source)