The student should breakup their review into five parts:
1. Who is the main target audience for this? How do you think the writer wanted them to respond?
2. What do you understand the writer’s main idea or thesis to be?
3. What topics, themes, or issues strike you as the most interesting and important in this reading?
4. What are the most questionable, controversial or obscure passages for you?
5. What sort of ethical/practical difference should this make in a current context?
Interaction with primary documents is extremely valuable for the historian. Any competent historian should be able to discern context (Q1), identify the author’s intent (Q2), and identify key topics, etc (Q3). Furthermore, all historians inevitably come with a bias – they are looking at the text for a purpose, an “agenda”. To their credit, Christian historians have historically been more honest in admitting this, and thus have done so (on the whole) more responsibly. Our bias helps us assess texts by Christian criteria (Q4). Furthermore, as Christians, our bias makes us assume that these texts were written by
People who serve the same God as us for His glory, and as such, they potentially have something to help the Church do that now, too (Q5).
Students should dedicate relatively little space to the first two questions (about 20%). Most of their space should go to the third question (about 50%), with the rest spread between the other two (about 30%).
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