Task 5: Outline the Book’s Flow of Thought
Essence of the Task
Outline (in bullet points, description, or sketch) the book’s flow of thought together with its main arguments.
Detailed Description
If in the previous task you managed to summarize certain key elements for understanding the book as a whole, this task is – in a sense – the logical culmination of that work. This assignment asks you to make a «map» of the book’s trajectory.
If you think about maps, you know that they can be of different types and scales. The same can be said of the outlines of a biblical book. Depending on the time you have available, the characteristics of the book itself, and the degree of information you want to capture, your map can be more or less detailed.
What is essential, however, is to gather the fruit of your study thus far on the biblical book – as a whole – in order to be able to describe the contours of the argument in a way that will serve to locate and guide each lesson or sermon you prepare.
To Do
Think for a moment. What kind of «map» would most help you – on the one hand – develop each lesson or sermon in the series more effectively, and – on the other hand – always keep your listeners aware of where they are in the storyline of the book, and how the portion covered in each specific lesson contributes to the completion of the journey as a whole.
There are different map styles you can follow. To begin with, try developing one of the following ideas for the Bible book you are working on right now. For a future series, you might want to try one of the other ideas.
- Meta-Outline. This is perhaps the easiest, since outlines are already a natural part of so many resources. Any commentary, encyclopedia, or Study Bible will come with an outline as part of its introduction. For this reason, this may be the easiest way to summarize a book’s «flow of thought». It would simply be a matter, not of expanding the outlines in your resources, but of summarizing and simplifying. That is, to be able to see the whole of the argument at a glance. You would end up with the kind of outline you could use to give a one-minute summary to anyone who asks you – or in the introduction to each lesson or presentation – of how the biblical author develops his message.
- «Mind map.» Another way to convey the book’s flow of thought could be to illustrate it using the branches or bubbles of a «mind map». In contrast to a classic outline organized by paragraphs, a «mind map» is informally structured according to concepts. Visualizing the main lines of the argument in this way could offer a very interesting way to grasp – almost instantaneously – the relationships between concepts.
- Drawing. Finally, it might be interesting to draw the outline in some way. How to do this will depend on the content of a given book and the ideas and skills you may have as an artist. Some may find the idea of a road map idea useful. Others might find it interesting to present the plot in the form of a comic book. In the case of some biblical books, a chronological or even geographical diagram might be useful.
But one way or the other, the basic idea is the same: to develop a tool that allows you to remember and communicate the main lines of the biblical book you are studying for the current series.
This is not simply a nice idea that has little practical use. Rather, it is a tool that can place you almost «automatically» in the overall context of the book each week. Thus, it can save you a lot of time in the long run and, more importantly, help ensure that no particular lesson or sermon is detached from the larger context of the book, neither for you while preparing, nor for your listeners, as they relate today’s portion to the whole.
To Keep in Mind
Given the fact that you are developing the outline of the book toward the beginning of your study and not toward the end, it may be worthwhile to keep yourself open to the possibility of revising your outline or map as you progress in your study. In fact, all biblical study should be understood as a «spiral» dialogue, in which our understanding is refined and refined again and again by each new contact with the biblical text. Therefore, while a map may be invaluable at the beginning of the journey, it will always be better appreciated and can be more accurately nuanced once the section presently under study has been traversed.