Thanks so much, Misty, for the thread. It is something I have often pondered, I like your comments. Mine are somewhat different, I hope it will make bible students consider and think. I am sorry about some of these posts, they don't seem to me to be from Christ directed thinking.
Usage: I think that when Alexander the Great ushered in Greek type thinking, the way we think today, we need to know that lots of bible was written with how people thought before he came along. It means that when we expect such as the first chapter of Genesis to tell us how God created, and the time frame, it wasn't written to do that but to people who thought like early Hebrews, it is written to tell that God did it, now a manual on how. As an illustration. If we refuse to learn the difference between Hellenized thinking and Hebrew thinking, we have a hard time with the OT.
Context: I think the first thing to understand is that all scripture tells of the one God so if one scripture says God is cruel and another says God is loving, we are reading something wrong and we need to understand what scripture is really saying.
Historical: When scripture says something happened, and we see it is not a parable, then that thing happened, although the goal of all scripture is to illustrate God principles. If we see only history or we see only spiritual, both are not seeing correctly. Over and over, the bible shows the connection between what we do and what the spiritual meaning of that act is.
Logical: I think this gets a lot of people into errors about God when taken too far. It becomes listening to our minds and not reaching for the mind of God. It is like everything of God, there is a balance. No logic and all logic both leads wrong.
But this is really analyzing what could be summed up with that reading scripture is trying to understand the mind of God. Without God involved it could not be done.