Fides Quaerens Intellectum … Faith Seeks / Pursues Understanding

The Bible as we have it is broken up into some 31,000 verses organized under 1159 chapters with 66 “books,” 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament.  One perspective, easily adopted from casual reading, or even Bible memory verse work, is to grasp individual solitary verses (1 by each out of 31,000), and hold on to such as a meaningful communication from God to us.  Such it is.  However, taking individual verses or even a few at a time or even a longer passage in isolation leads to a shallow, or even flawed understanding of God’s intended communication to us.  We cannot treat verses as individual unrelated things as we might find them on the floor after an explosion at the print factory, or isolated sayings such as we might find quotations of wise men in a book or online resource.

The challenge is to cohere, knit together,

or as I will use here–“knot together,” as in “knot making”–to fit Scripture together so as to grasp not just an accurate understanding of the individual sentence components of the whole, but more importantly the point of the whole.

Following a metaphor from the scientific practice of archaeology…first the dig, then the tale.  So we must begin with a deep understanding of the individual verse-components of any “knot making.”  But once we’ve done that, our work then begins to ‘knot’ together Scripture with Scripture to grasp a coherent, whole idea.

Continuing with this knotmaking metaphor, let us consider two knots and their applications to Scripture:

• The “weaver’s knot”
• The “climber’s knot”

Three Choices

When we are confronted by God’s Word, the Bible, we are driven
to make one of Three Choices.  See the link of Three Choices here: