ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #1 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Hello, Dr. Adams. I'm looking forward to this course on the book of Exodus. I find that one thing that helps me to know how to study for a course is understanding what the professor is looking for, what his main emphasis is. What is the main thing that you as a professor want us to get out of this course? >> Let me answer that question or at least begin to answer that question with an observation that's drawn from my own experience as a student and also confirmed by years of teaching other students and talking with students and talking with pastors and also talking with other professors. In my experience on the whole over the years, exegesis, the study of the Bible, is probably the worst taught subject at any seminary. Not just Lutheran seminaries. But any seminary in general. And the reason for this is that those who teach exegesis are often unclear in their own minds about what they are trying to accomplish and why they are trying to accomplish it. When you teach exegesis or teach the study of the Bible, you can really approach the question in two different ways. One focuses on teaching the content of the Bible. The other focuses on teaching method, that is teaching how to interpret text. Both of these things are important. Most of the time, the emphasis is on teaching content. And what tends to happen in this case is the professor comes in. And he tells you what he has learned from studying the text. And the student is then left with, you know, a body of knowledge that he's gotten from the professor in his notes and in the things he's come to understand. But what's missing in the students's experience is any real idea of how to repeat the process on his own. He doesn't know how the professor got there from -- how he got from the text to that theological understanding of the text. And this is what tends to happen when you focus on teaching content. If you teach content alone, the student is left with a body of facts. But no real idea of how the professor got the results. As a result, the student isn't really able to go out and study other texts on his own and come up with the same kind of appropriate results. And also, without a proper understanding of the method in doing exegesis, a student isn't really equipped to evaluate what others say when he encounters things in other people's writings. And he's less well equipped to defend his own views. By contrast, if you focus on teaching method, a student comes to understand the content of the book because you have to engage the content anyway as a part of the process of teaching method. But in addition to learning the content, a student comes away with a set of skills that he's able to then apply in the study of other texts. And because he not only knows the answer, but understands how he got the answer, the student is better able to defend his own views with those who have another view of the text. And he's also better equipped to evaluate the views of others when he reads them in Bible study material or commentaries or those things. And so the first thing that I want to emphasize as we get ready to study the book of Exodus is that we'll be emphasizing method more than content. Although we'll be doing quite a bit with both. One cautionary here, though, it's a little more difficult to teach method in interpreting the Bible when we're only using a translation, when we're working on the basis of the English text. And I say that not because I'm a Hebrew professor and I'm a Hebrew snob. Although, I probably am. I say that because without access to the original text, you lose a significant part of the data that you need. You lose the grammar, the syntax. You lose access to the original vocabulary. And as a result, you know, you don't have all of the data that you need in front of you to do a full job of doing exegesis on the text. However, having said that, that doesn't mean that we can't do good things and that we can't get the main idea out of the text. It just means that we have to be a little more sensitive to information that we would get from commentaries and other things. And I'll help along the way to try to fill in the gaps. And I think we'll be able to get the things that we need out of the book of Exodus even studying primarily on the basis of the English text. But your question, Josh, is what was the main thing that I wanted students to get out of the course. The answer is, unfortunately, there's not just one main thing. There are a couple of things. First is I want students to come away with a love for the word of God. And it's important to understand what I mean by that when I say a love for the word of God. Often when I hear people say, "Oh, I love the word of God," what they really mean is they love the way the word of God makes them feel. When they read the Bible, they get a certain feeling. And they like that feeling. And that's what they mean when they say they love the word of God. That's not what I mean here. Although it's a perfectly valid position, it's not the one that I'm concerned about. The love of God that I'm concerned for is the love that moves us to deeply intentionally study the word. Often pastors who are poor preachers are not poor preachers because they don't understand how to preach. Rather, they are poor preachers because they don't have anything to say. They haven't really engaged the word of God that they are trying to preach deeply and fully. And as a result, they tend to fall back into, you know, common routine platitudes. And they end up saying the same thing in every sermon. Because they haven't really engaged the text. Because they haven't put the time and hard work into the study of the text that the text requires. So when I say that I want you to come out of this class with a love for the word of God, what I mean is I want you to come out of this class with a commitment to a life-long task of serious, intentional study of the word. The second thing that I would like you to come out of this class with is an understanding of the content of the Bible, especially, of course, the book of Exodus and how that fits into not only the context of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, but also the rest of the Old Testament and then the Old Testament in relation to the New Testament, as well. So we want to have an understanding not only of the people, places, things and events of the book of Exodus, but the way those contribute to the unfolding story of what God is doing in the world. The third thing I think I would like you to come away from this class with is a recognition that there's a difference between what we call exegesis and what most people do when they study the Bible. When most people study the Bible, they do what we might call devotional reading. And there's nothing wrong with devotional reading. We all need to do it. But it's not the same thing as exegesis. It differs in a couple of ways. For example, devotional reading is casual. I might sit down with my Bible and open to a book, Psalms in the Old Testament or one of the gospels in the New Testament, and start reading and let the word of God speak to me that day on that occasion. That's casual reading. And there's nothing wrong with it. It's good and important. But exegesis is not casual. Exegesis is intentional. Exegesis is sitting down with a particular text and examining that particular text in an intentional detailed throughway. And this -- really the second difference between exegesis and devotional reading: Devotional reading is kind of cursory. That is to say you read it and you really wait for the word of God to jump off the text at you and, you know, sort of see what God says to you today through the text. Whereas exegesis is about the details. It's not about just waiting to see what jumps off the page at you. But it's about digging in the details of the text to find what God has put there. A third way that devotional reading and exegetical reading differ is in what it finds there. In devotional reading our focus is usually on -- really on ourselves and our need. As I said before, we look at the text and what -- however God kind of speaks through the text to us at that moment is what we take away from the text. And the meaning that we end up with is really a personal meaning. We can share it with other people. But it's -- as people often say, "It's what God's word says to me at that moment." But that's not exegesis. Exegesis is seeking what we might call the public meaning of the text. It's the meaning that's -- that God has put there not for me at this particular moment in my life but for the people of God throughout the history of the people of God. We're seeking not what the text says to me but what the text says to the church, to the world in all times and in all places. And so the third thing then is, you know, understanding the difference between devotional reading and exegesis and particularly then how we do exegesis. And that leads us to the fourth thing, which really is where we started. That is that our emphasis is going to be primarily on method in this course. We're going to be looking at the book of Exodus with a view to understanding how we approach and interpret a book like this in -- you know, in the correct way. This kind of material is different from things that we frequently read in the Bible because it's narrative. Particularly in the Old Testament where, you know, people tend to gravitate toward books like the Psalms or the prophets where they find individual verses that are meaningful to them. But in a book like the book of Exodus, the real meaning of the -- of what God is saying comes through not -- not through an individual verse but through the whole story as it unfolds, the whole picture of what God is doing in the life of his people. And so we have to approach a narrative book like the book of Exodus differently than we would approach the book of Psalms or one of Paul's epistles in the New Testament. And we'll be focusing on how we do narrative and how theology is done in narrative books as we proceed in this course. And the last thing that we'll focus on in terms of method then is how we bridge what God was doing in the lives of his people in the church in Old Testament times, how we bridge that to today. So how Christ is revealed in these texts. How the Gospel is revealed in these texts. And what the implications of these texts for us in the church today are. And so those are the kinds of things that we will be focusing on as we move through our study of the book of Exodus. And I know that's a lot to begin with. It's more than one main thing. But Exodus is a big complex book. And there's a lot there. And most times when we read it, we miss much of what is there because of our cursory, casual, devotional way of reading the text. So we want to move beyond that to a more conscious, intentional and detailed study of a theological narrative in the book of Exodus. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***