Episode 144: Biblical Genres, Part 7--Epistles

Reading someone else's mail is like listening to one half of a phone conversation: you might be able to guess at what is being said on the other side, but you have to tease it out.  Reading the letters and epistles of the New Testament can feel like that sometimes: we hear someone like the apostle Paul giving counsel or directions for specific situations that his readers have asked him about, or he has to answer a particular question they have written to him about, and we have to infer from what he says what was going on.  It makes reading the Bible something like solving a mystery... but maybe that's not a bad way of thinking about it.  We are invited into an ongoing conversation when we read the epistles, whether it's the extended argumentation of Romans, the rabbinical midrash of Hebrews, or the personal appeals of the letter to Philemon.  So join us for the conversation this time as pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve take a look at the epistles in the New Testament, in this latest episode of Crazy Faith Talk.