750 word Response to BI103   I really enjoyed the course with Dr. Keener. I recently finished watching a video series on the Gospel of Mark, and while these two things were quite different, I appreciated Dr. Keener’s view on several of the points he makes.  Dr. Keener begins the course with reading the bible in context and takes aim at this consistent mood within the church to often associate several texts as their pet proof text regarding a certain person, thing, demon or situation. Well, as he brings out of, we find that often times the mood of most the church ends up being wrong and their favorite proof text lacks so much namely context. Context is a very important thing in bible interpretation and Dr. Keener points this out with recognizing the range of contexts and providing examples of them as well, there are ancient context that must be and ought to be accounted for especially when we are searching for meaning in God’s word. Many times, the church is at the mercy of the pulpit in discovering the meaning behind a text, when we begin to pick up the cognitive environment of the biblical writers, I think we can ascertain the meaning behind the text. Something that has been particularly important in my studies, but with Dr. Keener highlighting is the use of genre. Genre is the epistemological tool by use we understand the text, meaning when we can understand the genre; we understand the rules the biblical writer is playing by in each text. Each genre has specific rules and when we know the genre it gives us almost like a decoder ring for that given text. Keener describes Genre as such “Genre is the type of writing that something is, for example, poetry, prophesy, science fiction, bomb threat. Each of these is a different literary genre with different kinds of rules for how you write them. There are sometimes different interpretation principles for these different genres. Context applies to most of them. Background applies to most of them. But we need to read each passage with sensitivity to the particulars of the way it was written. For example, poetry uses a lot of figurative language. Ancient narrative was usually much more literal. So when we’re reading narrative, we need to look for the moral of the story. Ancient writers expected this. Whether they were dramatists, historians, or biographers, they often tell us that. That they want you to look for the moral of the story. They looked for patterns that they believed were already present when they constructed their accounts. Plutarch does this with his parallel lives.” Keener in his conclusion describes succinctly in what he is wanting us to learn, ‘First of all, the principle of context—always seeing what surrounds the passage that you’re studying. Secondly, the principle of whole-book context, that is, seeing how the passage fits into the whole book of which it’s a part, or sometimes the whole genre of which it’s a part if you’re dealing with something like Proverbs or Psalms. Third, look for the background. Try to figure out what situations were being addressed, or what kinds of issues were being addressed. Fourth, look at genres. Take into account the genres and the principles for those. As we’ve seen, many of these early principles apply to all the genres, but there are also specific ways we read particular kinds of genres, whether narrative, prophecy, or any other kind of genre that we covered letters. Ultimately, I want to bring this back to the first point that we mentioned, however, and that is the fear of the Lord. A basic principle of Bible interpretation is, you need to come to the text submitting to hear what God has to say to you, not to make the text say what you want it to say, but to really hear what the text has to say to you.’   We haven’t much else to describe in this course, Dr. Keener does an amazing job and I look foreword to his impressive future in how he is helping to craft future students of the word. We can all learn so much from these scholars it is a wonder why more don’t choose to invest more into their bible study. I am extremely blessed to be able to take in this course and I hope anyone who may read this will consider paying it.   Craig S. Keener, BI103 Principles of Bible Interpretation, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015).