Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Here are some additional tips to make use of the “Tracing Guide” by
Dr. Brian Vickers and the chapter on “The Nature of the Bible and How
to Study It” by Dr. Jim Hamilton.
1. Pray. Ask the Lord to open your eyes to see Him in His Word.
5. Read the passage and highlight key words that will serve as
indicators of the relationships between propositions.
6. Find the relationships within each verse itself first. Then find
relationships with neighboring verses. Then begin to link to
other verses/relationships in the text.
• CAUTION: When you do these further studies, keep in mind the proper
usage of your study tools.
• Dictionaries and lexicons give the range of meaning of a word. Avoid
illegitimate totality transfer, where you assign all the possible meanings of
a word to one particular usage of it. Usually a word is only conveying one of
those meanings in a single usage! A concordance (especially Young’s
Analytical Concordance or the Englishman’s Hebrew-English or Greek-English
Concordance) will help you see how the word is used elsewhere in the same
paragraph, book, testament, and whole Bible so you can make an educated
choice as to which meaning it is actually conveying in the passage under
study.
CAPS Phase 1: Hermeneutics Notes, Session 6 2
Tracing an Argument in the Epistles
• Watch out for the etymological fallacy. Finding a word’s history or original
meaning (when it was first coined) does not mean that the word still means
the same thing. Also, beware adding up the sum of compound words to
discern the meaning. Imagine the disaster if you tried to explain “butterfly”
based on its two parts: “an airborne dairy product.”1 Ridiculous as this
sounds, sometimes a preacher’s “insights” into a word in the original
language can be just as ludicrous.
• The usage of the word, not its roots, is primary in determining its meaning.
(However, the history/roots of a word may be helpful for understanding rare
words or names, although we want to be careful of being too dogmatic when
the meaning is hypothetical.2)
Use the space to the left of the Scripture to “trace the argument” with a diagram.
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
1
See D. A. Carson’s discussion of the “root fallacy” in Exegetical Fallacies 2nd Ed.
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1996), 28-33.
2
Robert H. Stein, A Basic Guide to Interpreting the Bible: Playing by the Rules (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994), 172-173.
CAPS Phase 1: Hermeneutics Notes, Session 6 3
Tracing an Argument in the Epistles
In the space below, you can draw curves over the proposition numbers that
help you visualize the tracing diagram, turned on its side. This is called
“arcing.”
__________________________________________________________
| 3:17a | 17b | 18 | 19a | 19b | 19c | 19d | 20a | 20b | 21a | 21b | 4:1 |
For digging deeper: