Philippians Introduction Class

Expectations and Introduction to the Midweek Class

Vision Cast

Learning is good, knowledge is a stewardship. Knowledge can puff up, but we want this to be worship!

Giving you the tools to do theology on your own, to think about the Bible in a thoughtful, humble, and honest (with integrity) way for the glory of Christ!

Community of learning, prayer, and discipleship.

Doctrine of Scripture

The Bible is a story, it comes to us as a book with many books and all the books help inform us about each other. In fact, they progressively reveal more about each other.

“A helpful way of describing the phenomena of Scripture is by viewing the Bible as a word-act revelation. What does this mean? It means that Scripture is God’s own authoritative interpretation of his redemptive acts through the agency of human authors.”

Scripture is ultimately about Christ, that does not mean every single verse is describing Christ, but every verse is leading to Christ Himself.

Studying Scripture

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (Scripture demands us to look closely at it as Christians, it’s for our sanctification and our walk with Christ; in other words, you can’t go deep with Christ if you don’t go deep with His Word)

We study Scripture from an understanding that it is God’s Word, and that our understanding of it really matters. We study it with it in mind, meaning, we do not try to impose something on it, but we try to pull out the author’s intent. In short, we try to pull out its meaning, not necessarily what we feel it means, and we do this with humility, wrestling with the text to understand what it is trying to communicate. The author’s intent is important because people mean to be understood! Think about this: your spouse or roommate writes you a note and it reads, “I will be coming home late, could you put the food away before I get back, so it doesn’t spoil.” If you read that and think, “Hmm… What an Interesting and creative take on the political tension of 18th century Africa” then you completely missed what’s being communicated. In other terms, we speak and act in ways so that people understand what we are doing! What we’re seeing is that the author’s intention is the most important thing to grasp in biblical interpretation!

History, Literature, and Theology.

What happens in Philippians

Joy, Unity, Christology (theology of Christ), Union with Christ, dealing with false-teaching

Note the work of Jim Hamilton on your own.

The world around Philippi and Philippi itself

First, it is helpful to note that I will assume that Philippians was written by Paul during his final imprisonment while in Rome (which is why I will assume a late 50s or early 60s date). This, however, is not the only view, some hold that Paul wrote this in Caesarea, Ephesus, or even Corinth. These are all viable views and holding to Cesarean provenance (which means place of writing) then the dating would be a couple of years earlier. With that being said, interpreting the data is nearly speculation, and saying which location it is dogmatically is misguided.

The city of Philippi has an interesting history, as it was the place of many significant battles. It is named after Philip II of Macedonia, and it is situated in a fertile region with springs and gold mines. It later became a Roman city and was honored as a city with the highest of Roman honors. The battles took place because of the assassination of Caesar. With this in mind, we can know that Philippi was thoroughly Roman and thus thoroughly Hellenized (in other words: Greekified!).

Within Philippians, it would be helpful for us to see how far Epaphroditus traveled. To do that, we can find Thessaloniki on the map (south of Dacia), as Philippi was just east of Thessaloniki, and then find Rome, and once done we can see the great length that Epaphroditus went!