Wisdom on reading well (part 2): Tom Torrance

Part two of a series about lessons authors have given me on how to read the Bible.

I've recently posted notes of Thomas Torrance's very detailed and carefully thought through principles for learning. They all deserve meditating on. I also recently read this by him:

Normally when one reads an author one understands what he says be looking with him at the 'object' to which he points or which he describes, but early in the nineteenth century there grew up the tendency to study the text of an author in its correlation with the 'subject' or the author himself rather than in its correlation with the objective reality he intended, and so to read it as an expression of his individuality or genius [...] Applied to the New Testament, however, this meant that the focus of attention was not so much upon Jesus Christ himself in his ontological reality as Son of God become man, or even as objective historical figure, but upon the creative spirituality of the early Church"

(pp. 35-36, TF Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian)