In reading the article on Scripture as Sacramental Word written by Burgess what he had to say really opened my eyes because I was confronted by new thoughts and information that I really wasn't aware of before. I will discus some of these things that I have found in this article that I thought were interesting.
One point that Burgess's points out is the fact that learning a foreign language for most of us is a big adventure I can tell you that for me this was true. When you first learn a foreign language you learn the certain word meanings and how to pronounce them as well. Along with the way you put the words in order and how they are conveyed in a sentence. This got me pondering the thought that if I knew more about the time period and the usage of language that was used back when the Bible was written I would have a better understanding about some of the scripture and the meaning that it was trying to portray.
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The Gutenberg Bible displayed by the United States...The culture and time period makes a vast difference in what is meant by different things and although we may think that we know what they are saying, there are still times that we don't due to the differences in time and culture that appear in the language. With the aspect of dealing with language in the Bible the main format was poetry because it was part of the culture and because it had power behind it which could catch your attention. When the author mentioned this I thought about our culture today and I realized that we have gotten way from the aspect of poetry. There are still some parts in our culture that have poetry for example music and in plays but there are some people that still write poetry today, these people write just too express his or her inner feelings. I was thinking that we should start incorporating this style of writing more in our culture because this would leave you open to expressing yourself more open because you don't have all the rules that you have to follow in Narrative writing. Also if we incorporated this today we would have a greater understanding of literature written when poetry was in its prime. Poetry is pleasing to the ear which can be use in many different ways today like in advertising, romance it sounds very pleasant.
In another section of the article that Burgess talks about is reading in places of the Bible that might not be that interesting to me and you. But yet you still need to read these parts because they have important information in them. This is very true in today's culture in America because we as Americans want to have all the answers in a quick and easy way it is like we just want the information handed to us or having someone feed us the information. In the Bible this is not possible because you have to look at it in extreme depth, especially at some of the books where you still don't get the full meaning out of the text. In our culture we would rather read cliff notes than to read the actual text. When you do this you don't get the fullest meaning. When somebody gives you the information in a brief summary especially when you are dealing with the Bible, chances are that you are taking there opinion to being the truth and we are not exploring other options that there are in the world.
A bible from 1859.
Nanjing Foreign Language School
Book of Genesis, Jianning (Jian'ou) Bible.