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This is the update to finish out the month of November, however it is not the end of the class! Last week we began our 3rd class at the Eleuthera Bible Training Center in Rock Sound: New Testament Survey!
It is an daunting class to teach, and highly rewarding. Imagine having to cover all the books of the NT and trying to carve out only the most significant portions – its quite impossible to do. I’m constantly reminding the class that we’re simply at the 30,000 ft level looking down at these books.
And that is the major struggle with a survey course. We cover a ton of material, and rarely do we get to delve into the details of what’s happening.
As a history buff, I’m convinced that one of the most helpful and enlightening approaches to the NT is to look at the background behind what is written and why it was written. Each book is presented with authorship, genre, theme, purpose and occasion, as well as structural elements and defining characteristic.
We conclude each book by looking in-depth at one passage, a verse or two that I call the “Key Passage.” Then as a class we practice the skills we learned in course #1 – Bible Study Method and Rules of Interpretation. Word by word, line by line we go walk through the text with our guides of Observation, Interpretation, and Application. The students are constantly amazed at what they can see when they slow down through a passage, and they’re blown away at what you find for a Bible Study lesson in only 5-10 minutes.
I will have more to write about this class once it is finished, but for now I’ll leave it as one of the most challenging classes I’ve ever taught. Sometimes, those are the most rewarding!