Page 16 - Homiletics Student Textbook

1. Who is the author and to whom is he writing?
2. What is the historical, cultural, political, and geographical setting?
3. What is the general, immediate, and following context?
4. What is the grammar structure and syntactical arrangement of the text?
5. What words were chosen and how are they used?

The key to this part of the journey is observation. This goes beyond seeing the text to
examining the text with great scrutiny, to the finest of details.
Upon completion of this careful examination, the main thoughts
that the author is conveying to the recipients of his message will
become most evident. These thoughts are recorded as statements
of past action and summarized into a single statement with both a
subject and a complement. This statement is the single meaning of
the text for the biblical audience at that time in history.

Grasping the Text in Their Town
What is the time-bound exegetical principle in this text?
What did the text mean to the original audience then?
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B. Measuring the Width of the River to Cross

…the Christian today is separated from the biblical audience by differences in culture, language,
situation, time, and often covenant. These differences form a river that hinders us from moving
straight from meaning in their context to meaning in ours. The width of the river, however,
varies from passage to passage. Sometimes it is extremely wide, requiring a long, substantial
bridge for crossing. Other times, however, it is a narrow creek that we can easily hop over. It is
obviously important to know just how wide the river is before we start trying to construct a
principlizing bridge across it.
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In this step, one must purposely examine the differences that exist between what the biblical
audience was experiencing then versus what people are experiencing today. There may be
differences of time, language, culture, covenant, or life situation. Such differences play an
important role in determining just how far our time travel has taken
us – how wide the gap is between life then and life now.

Measuring the Width of the River to Cross
What are the differences between the biblical audience and people
today?
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C. Crossing the Principlizing Bridge

23 Duvall & Hays, 22.
24 Duvall & Hays, 22.
25 Duvall & Hays, 22.
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