{"id":1831,"date":"2005-01-10T15:11:28","date_gmt":"2005-01-10T20:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1831"},"modified":"2005-01-10T15:11:28","modified_gmt":"2005-01-10T20:11:28","slug":"the-way-to-apply-the-truth-to-my-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2005\/01\/the-way-to-apply-the-truth-to-my-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Way to Apply the Truth to (My) Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I read yesterday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s text<\/a> from the David O. McKay reader, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Jesus Christ: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Way, the Truth, and the Life,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac? I was struck by its repeated injunction to apply Christ\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s words to our lives\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand, more boldly, to extend that application into the world. I frequently hear admonitions of this sort urging me to liken the scriptures to myself,<\/a> and inasmuch as this means merely that I must be a doer of the word and not a hearer only, I think I get it. But once I get down to the actual business at hand\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat is, reading the scriptures and figuring out how they bear on my life\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI confess I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m often at a loss: what does it mean to apply the scriptures to one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life?<\/p>\n

I love studying the scriptures, I really do: commentaries, topical study, cross references, notes in the margins, the whole bit. When I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m faced with moral choice in my everyday life, though, I have rarely found direct guidance in the scriptures: the large and small dilemmas and decisions of my world, embroidered as they are on an early-21st-century life and lifestyle, seem far more susceptible to the strictures of my temple covenants and the pronouncements of present-day prophets than to the (wonderfully rich, marvelously polyvalent, breathtakingly beautiful, but ultimately temporally removed) scriptures. The problem may lie partly in my expectations, partly in my method: perhaps I misunderstand what \u00e2\u20ac\u0153application\u00e2\u20ac? means, or perhaps the generic hybridity of the scriptures requires me to expand and adapt my repertoire of reading strategies. In hopes of accomplishing the latter, a brief anatomy of scripture-application methods (or hermeneutics, if you prefer):<\/p>\n

1. Personal proof-texting. I have a question about, say, disciplining my three-year-old; I go to the Topical Guide, look up \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Family, Children, Responsibilities,\u00e2\u20ac? and try to glean from the half-column of references a solution that makes sense in my circumstances.<\/p>\n

2. Catalyst to personal revelation. I pray about the problem, then go to the scriptures (perhaps even at random) where a particular passage (perhaps even regardless of its context or meaning) seems to jump out at me with particular clarity: the Holy Ghost transmits a personalized answer using the scriptural text as a medium for inspiration.<\/p>\n

3. Prophecy. A small percentage of scripture consists of prophecy to be fulfilled in the latter days; I determine that it is only this portion of scripture that is intended to be applied to latter-day life.<\/p>\n

4. Moral law. Some small proportion of scripture consists of direct commandments, and some proportion of those commandments is still in effect; I determine that it is only this subset of scripture that is directly applicable to my life. <\/p>\n

5. Casuistry. I take scriptural narratives to embody \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pure cases\u00e2\u20ac? of good or evil behavior, from those cases I distill principle, and from that principle I extract a solution to my particular \u00e2\u20ac\u0153impure\u00e2\u20ac? case. <\/p>\n

6. Critical meta-reading. As Julie suggests,<\/a> I consider scripture primarily as text in order ask what challenges or dilemmas it presents to the reader; from those challenges or dilemmas I draw some moral principle (perhaps even unrelated to the content of the passage) that bears on my life.<\/p>\n

One would think that I, as a professionally trained reader, could make at least one of these methods work for me. On its own, though, each of these methods leaves me cold in one way or another: 1 and 2 require too much disregard of historical context and difference for me to feel comfortable; 3 and 4 rarely yield specific principles that bear on my life; 5 and 6 require too much sophistication from the reader to seem fair to untrained readers of the scriptures. What have I left out? How do you liken the scriptures to your life? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I read yesterday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s text from the David O. McKay reader, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Jesus Christ: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Way, the Truth, and the Life,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac? I was struck by its repeated injunction to apply Christ\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s words to our lives\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand, more boldly, to extend that application into the world. I frequently hear admonitions of this sort urging me to liken the scriptures to myself, and inasmuch as this means merely that I must be a doer of the word and not a hearer only, I think I get it. But once I get down to the actual business at hand\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat is, reading the scriptures and figuring out how they bear on my life\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI confess I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m often at a loss: what does it mean to apply the scriptures to one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}