Bible Biblical Understanding of God Essay

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In contrast to a diachronic approach is a synchronic approach. This constitutes an examination of something at a single point in time. There is no speculation or even consideration of how the phenomenon might have been in the past or how it might be in the future. A synchronic approach is a form of reification, a privileging of one moment in time over all others.

Two examples of diachronic analysis that are very helpful in furthering one's understanding of the messages of the Bible. One is a changing sense of language and languages. The languages that the Bible has been presented in have changed themselves from Hebrew and Greek to Latin and then to a wide range of vernacular languages.

These linguistic changes have shifted the meanings of each passage in the Bible as have the changes internal to each language itself. Languages are living (and dying) creatures, and even when the language of the Bible did not change, the mundane meanings of many of the words did change, and only a diachronic analysis can track all of these changes of meaning that is sufficient to understanding the meaning of the Bible on the level of individual words and texts.

Diachronic analysis of the Bible also helps one to understand changing concepts of the most important events in the Bible. An event as central as the death of Jesus might seem to be a candidate for an enduring interpretation. But all aspects of the Bible are seen through personal understanding that is influences by history and culture. This is, again, not in any way a diminishment of the divinity of God or the sacredness of the Bible. It is simply an acknowledgement that humanity, as God's creation, is sufficiently complex to accomplish continual change.

A useful synchronic analysis of a Biblical subjects takes a study of the Bible outside of the course of history and culture and freezes it. Generally those who interpret the Bible synchronically argue that the version of the Bible that they are studying is the final or most complete one. They argue that the versions touched by other moments of history are in no way false ones but rather are ones that do not present as clear a reading of the nature of any passage as is available to the synchronic study of the Bible.

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A synchronic perspective of the Bible is thus generally not interested with the origin of a text although it is often (at least hopefully) based on what might be called a fundamentalist perspective on a text. The synchronic scholar looks at the moment in which any Biblical writer or describe is speaking to his (or her) contemporaries in the most authentic way possible. This is the true reading that must be honored by those who wish to find the truest, deepest meaning of any given text.

Synchronic analyses can also help locate a specific Bible text to the literary, artistic, and cultural concerns of the moment of its being written down. Again, this is not meant as a diminishment of the divinity of any Biblical text. Connecting the Bible to aspects of human society is simply to connect God's word and presence as evidenced in the Bible to the activities of God's children in the world that he created for them.

Both perspectives have value and depend on the goals of the textual reading, the nature and personality of the person who is engaged in the research, and the religious perspective of the individual. A Jewish scholar and a Christian scholar may well have different readers, as may somewhere from the 12th….....

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