What am I going to do?

I’m going to read the Bible straight through with a specific concept in mind, attempting to note and consider every time the text touches on this concept in some way. My test-concept is: Obligation.

To be obliged is to be socially, legally, or morally bound to pursue or avoid a certain course of action. I want to note the kinds of obligations described in Scripture, the ways these obligations are formed, and the prophetic witness regarding the validity, meaning, and importance of these obligations. But I should immediately amend this description with the following caveats:

I am not performing the detestable sort of topical study which attempts to find every verse in Scripture that utilizes a single word, compile these verses as an independent document, and draw “logical” conclusions from the aggregated sentences. I firmly reject this practice because it misrepresents the nature of Scripture—a genre-diverse book, with many authors and many editors. No mechanically compiled set of sentences from such a book could reasonably be expected to provide any sort of coherent theory whatsoever.

I am also not performing the only slightly less detestable act of attempting to develop a “biblical philosophy of obligation” or some such nonsense by compiling my observations as if they were premises in a single argument. That would only be a deceptively more respectable variation on the fiasco I mentioned in the last paragraph.

I do not yet have any pretensions to being a systematic theologian or biblical exegete competent enough to pronounce authoritatively on so multi-faceted, morally complex, and ubiquitous an idea as obligation—merely after having read through the Bible once with obligation in mind!

What I am attempting to do is to allow the narratives, poetry, letters, prophecies, sermons, and conversations of Scripture spur my ideas about obligation how they will. In a sense I am seeking to meditate systematically upon texts derived from Scripture with the goal of enlarging my conception of one important category in life. I suspect that this process will drive me from the text to the mirror and window, with new questions for myself and the world regarding how and why and in what ways we are obliged to each other and to God, and also back to the text with new questions regarding why the authors (and the Author) treated obligation in the ways they did.

As to how this new attempt affects you, faithful readers: I will be liveblogging the entire experiment. While I won’t allow it to take over all the blogging I do here at The Veil Away, you can expect it to be a very frequently recurring subject as I compile the best of my notes and publish them as an ongoing commentary/dialogue-with-the-text.

I won’t set a specific time-frame for this project. I will simply read as much each day as my allotted time allows and my note-taking permits. I will then post whenever I have compiled a reasonably self-contained and coherent set of notes on an identifiable segment of the text. Feel free to comment at any time with suggestions or your own reflections on the aspects of obligation that we explore. I’d love for the process to be as communal as possible.