Scot McKnight and a quiz

Recently, Leadership Journal asked Scot McKnight to create a hermneneutical quiz to "uncover our hermeneutical blind spots." The quiz ran in the winter issue and now has been made available online, The Hermeneutics Quiz Your biblical blind spots and what you tend not to see.

Here is an excerpt from the article Scot McKnight wrote in Christianity today...

"For some reason of late, I have become fascinated with the portions of the Bible we don't tend to read, passages like the story of Jephthah. Or how God was on the verge of killing Moses for not circumcising his son, and his wife stepped in, did what needed to be done, and tossed the foreskin at Moses' feet, and God let him alone.

I'm curious why one of my friends dismisses the Friday-evening-to-Saturday-evening Sabbath observance as "not for us today" but insists that capital punishment can't be dismissed because it's in the Old Testament.

I have become fascinated with what goes on in our heads and our minds and our traditions (and the latter is far more significant than many of us recognize) in making decisions like this.

What decisions? Which passages not to read as normative. The passages we tend not to read at all.

If we're all subject to selective perception, at least to some degree, it's important to recognize what we tend to miss or gloss over, especially if we're church leaders.

This quiz is designed to surface the decisions we make, perhaps without thinking about them, and about how we both read our Bible and don't read our Bible. Some will want to quibble with distinctions or agree with more than one answer. No test like this can reveal all the nuances needed, but broad answers are enough to raise the key issues. On a scale of 1-5, mark the answer that best fits your approach to reading the Bible. (If you fall between response 1 and response 3, give yourself a 2.) Your score will reveal where you land on our hermeneutical scale."


1 comment:

  1. Very interesting. I have taken many "Evaluations". I found myself a little suprised at what I was not absolute on. Being a girl who's scale of one to ten really only contains 1 AND 10. . . This makes me want to evaluate why i am absolute on some and not on others. Probably Mr McNight's purose :) Am I swayed by flesh (personal experience)? Or is my scale of one and ten being stretched to include 2-9. How can you be sure that numbers 2-9 are grace and not relativism? A whole new set of questions for me?

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