Lesson 4 | Discern the Core Issue

Study Skill: Five W's and an H

We now turn our focus to developing skills for identifying what the author is talking about. This light-hearted video sets the stage well: if you don’t know what someone is talking about, things get confusing very quickly...


So far, with the Attention Getters and Questions lenses, we have focused on particular details that have come to the surface in our reading. It is now time to widen the view in order to grasp the author’s message. We have already explored some questions that the text has prompted us to ask; now we need to ask a key question of the text. We need to look at the whole passage and ask, “What is the author talking about?” In fact, the author’s message may not center on what but who, when, where, why, or how. That is, the author’s interest may focus on a person, a time/season/era, a place, a reason/rationale, or the way something did or should happen. In short, our task is to discern the author’s primary burden in a given chapter.
1. Start with each paragraph
Authors and editors typically form paragraphs around a single topic. Thus, a wise reader will take time to discern the primary topic or theme in each paragraph. Even when a theme or event carries over from one paragraph to another (which they most often do), each paragraph will have its own particular point of focus.
Be alert to the fact that the biblical authors did not write using paragraphs; later editors added these to aid the readers. Thus, while paragraph divisions are not authoritative, they are generally helpful when discerning the topics of a chapter.
2. Use a wide angle lens to view the whole chapter
Move a step further back in order to take in the sum of all the paragraphs. Which one of the five W’s and an H is the author’s primary concern? The answer may be the same as in one of the paragraphs. That is, the topic within one paragraph may be the point of focus for the whole chapter, with the other paragraphs providing support. Alternatively, you may find that there is a theme that runs like a thread through the whole chapter.


(Of course, widening our lens even further—beyond the present chapter—is also important. We will do this later in our study using the Context lens.)
3. Raise a caution flag on your own interests
We can easily come to a passage with a preconceived idea of the author’s message. We may be on target, but then again…we may not. Moreover, we come to the text carrying many personal interests, concerns, circumstances that can act as filters on our reading. And so it is important to recognize our biases in order to hear the author on his own terms. Simply put, the author’s primary concern is not necessarily—or even likely—to be your pet interest.
4. Identify evidence for your assessment
Discerning the author’s primary burden may often be a judgment call. However, it is not a merely subjective endeavor. The author does have a message to communicate. Our task is to accurately assess what that message is. We should be able to identify specific evidence that points to a particular topic being the main topic. Look for:
A prominent word or phrase that everything else builds around
Repeated words or phrases
Synonyms—the author may use a variety of terms to speak of the same thing
A topic that stands at the beginning and the end, framing the whole chapter
One topic that cannot be eliminated without making whole fall apart
5. Be alert to genre
All genres (types of literature) do not communicate a message in the same way. The helps we have provided above fit well with most genres. But a few special cases are worth noting:
OT Narrative and Acts
Pay attention when the narrator provides the meaning of names (both people and places). For example, in Lesson 1, you briefly explored Ruth 1. In that chapter, Naomi brings the primary issue forward when she says, “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter” (Ruth 1:20). (Naomi means “pleasant; Mara means “bitter.”)
The dialogue between characters will often shine a spotlight on the central topic.
Look for commentary on the events either from the narrator or God’s own direct voice.
Recognize that the message of a narrative is often built across several episodes—and indeed, across the entire arc of salvation history.
Gospels
Each Gospel writer chose to include and arrange particular details in his presentation of the person and work of Jesus. Thus, we should pay attention to the topics as the author presents them.
We ought also to discern the message Jesus has for his listeners. In any given sermon or dialogue, what is Jesus’s main burden?
Wisdom Literature (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon)
Be alert to how the whole Bible addresses a particular topic raised in Wisdom Literature and ask, “What contribution does a given chapter make in that trajectory?” For while the topic of any given paragraph may be relatively easy to identify, the interpretations and applications drawn from it can be quite skewed if not read in light of the whole Bible.


There is certainly much more that can be said about interpreting various biblical genres. If you are interested in pressing deeper, we encourage you to explore our Interpretation course.
Let’s now consider how the Topics lens in the Markup module can facilitate your study.