Monday, November 3, 2008

Chapterandversianity

Saint Paul wrote letters, David wrote poems and songs, Solomon wrote proverbs and the occassional saucy love song, none of them wrote chapters and verses.

Yes chapters and verses are useful in that they make reading a memorising texts easier, however I would suggest that they actually detract from the original meanings of the texts and create lazy thinking Christians who can quote chapter and verse for every situation but are still out of touch with both God and the world around them.

The very basis of the hermeneutical circle is that we can only understand the parts of a text by understanding the whole, and by then understanding the parts we achieve a greater understanding of the whole, and so the cycle goes.

By relying on a system of chapters and verses which most certainly were not in the mind of the original authors, I fear we fail to fully grasp the whole of the texts we read and thus impair our understanding of the parts, and so the cycle of misunderstanding goes.