Comprehensive Understanding of Fee and Stuart's How to Read the Bible for All it's Worth and Hermeneutical Spiral by Grant Osborne

Running head: THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
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1THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Theology is regarded as an ancient intellectual discipline constituting of systematic and
momentous social significance across all the arenas of the contemporary society. Thus
developing insights of the intellectual explanations is considered to be immensely vital
underpinned of religious traditions and ideologies and of social as well as cultural contexts for
religious ideologies and practice1. The essay aims to shed light on the comprehensive
understanding of Fee and Stuart’s “How to Read the Bible for All it’s Worth” and
“Hermeneutical Spiral” by Grant Osborne.
In the book, “How to Read the Bible for All it’s Worth”, authors Gordon Fee and
Douglas Stuart have explicitly provided the evangelical community with a salient as well as
veridical explanation of hermeneutical ideologies and principles which are of immense
importance to the learning of Scripture. It has been noted that “How to Read the Bible for All it’s
Worth” is recognized as an inclusive understanding with concepts applicable to every believer
despite of the individualistic level of theological insights2. The authors in the first chapter of
“How to Read the Bible for All it’s Worth” intended to interpret the underlying connotations
through enlightened common sense of understandings. As readers of the text can be recognized
as interpreters, one can easily comprehend the preconceived ideas of the writings further
regarded as ‘eisegesis’. The primary concern of the book lies in providing inclusive
understanding of the texts with an amalgamation of concepts on the way readers can interpret
Scripture with utmost efficacy through the theoretical concepts associated to exegesis and
hermeneutics3. However prior to the exploration of intricacies of hermeneutics conceptualization,
1 Crockett, Clayton. Radical political theology: Religion and politics after liberalism. Columbia University
Press, 2013.
2 Fee, Gordon D., and Douglas Stuart. How to read the Bible for all its worth. Zondervan, 2014.
3 Fee, Gordon D., and Douglas Stuart. How to read the Bible for all its worth. Zondervan, 2014.

2THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
authors Fee and Stuart successfully offers certain copious explanations for the pursuit of the
analysis and understanding of Scripture. In one of the chapters of the book, the authors suggested
consulting Bible thesaurus or commentary introduction in order to develop knowledge regarding
Corinth, the ancient city-state in Greece and its people. Furthermore, the fourth chapter of the
book has established ground propositions for epistolary hermeneutics whereby the first rule
stated true explanations of a text does not have the ability to provide similar interpretations to its
authors or original readers4. While the second rule had focused on similar specific life situations
with first century hearers whereby the words of God have similar significance as his Word is to
them. The authors further shed light on the periodic text for the apostolic age, whereby the
authors stated the primary purpose of Luke in Acts does not comprise of as much significance in
the biography of apostolic individualistic or normative modelling in the church institution. Thus
it has been noted that apocalyptic literature in the book has been satiated with ideas of
symbolism and further has delineated an apocalyptic genre despite of the persuasion of any
distinctive interpretive agenda.
The book” Hermeneutical Spiral” by Grant Osborne has been recognized as an
amalgamated genre of texts constituted with the aim which has been regarded as ambiguous. The
writer argued that hermeneutics is a spiral from text to context regarded as a progress between
the horizon of the textual understanding and the perspective or understanding of the readers
which tends to elevate nearer towards the deliberate connotations of the text and its relevant
importance in the contemporary society5. The ideas constituted in the book appeared to be
discrepant with the previous statements and understand the biblical explanation which entailed a
4 Fee, Gordon D., and Douglas Stuart. How to read the Bible for all its worth. Zondervan, 2014.
5 Osborne, Grant. "The hermeneutical spiral: a comprehensive introduction to biblical interpretation."
(2017).