A Lawyer's approach to Scripture...

Today as I was reading Morris' blog today and thinking about how I wanted to comment, I realized that my approach to scripture has been highly influenced by my legal education (please hold the jokes to the end of this post).  It has actually been a very useful approach for me and I owe it, mostly, to Professor Wendel.  Anytime a case presented itself, Professor Wendel always wanted us to look at three levels of addressing the case.  Let's take a simple example that I've used many times before.  It won't be a case, but it will be somewhat illustrate the point.  A two year old child stands at Main street, a very busy street, and starts to cross.  Her mother, upon seeing this, rushes up, grabs the child by the hand and says, "you are never to cross this street without me."  Now, let's use the Wendel method on these events.

The first level of dissection is the "Fact" level.  At this level, you addressed the facts of the case, the specific set of circumstances with which the court was dealing.  Here we have a very young child, and a very busy street that the child is contemplating crossing.  These facts are extremely important because the let us know exactly what is happening here and help us understand why the mother said what she did.  However, in order for this situation to be useful to other situations, we need to go to the next level, the "Rule" level.  While it may be useful for this mother to say that "no two year old daughter standing at Main Street is allowed to cross the street without me," that isn't very helpful in situations that vary from this one.  What about First Street?  What about a three year old?  What about a calm street?