Quotes About Interpretation

When 'biblical' theologies ignore the gospels, something is clearly very wrong." (on atonement theories)

Like the Hindu in Belfast who was asked whether he was a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu, those of us who follow this fresh reading of the New Testament want to say to our critics right and left, 'Don't imagine that because we don't check all your fundamentalist boxes, we must be modernists, or that because we don't check all your modernist boxes, we must be fundamentalists.

If the Bible is not simply "revelation," neither is it simply a devotional aid, even the primary devotional aid.

It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus's "divine" status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.

All this means that we are called to be people who learn to hear God's voice speaking today within the ancient text, and who become vessels of that living word in the world around us.

There was no template of expectations out of which, granted the crucifixion of Jesus, one might have anticipated the sophisticated range of interpretation that the early Christian movement in fact produced, understanding the death of Jesus as a messianic victory and connecting it with the long-awaited divine return.

Jews too, have assumed otherwise (suggesting, for instance, that Paul the Apostle was a traitor to the Jewish world or that he had never really understood it in the first place), the point is worth stressing before we even approach the main work of Paul's life.

This idea of God being faithful to the covenant clearly seems to be Paul's meaning here in Romans 3.

it is possible to allow the study of the text, and of different interpretations of the text, to become a substitute for allowing the text to bring us into the presence of the living God.

Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation.

Once you lose the kingdom theme, which is central to the gospels, everything else becomes reinterpreted in ways that radically distort, that substitute a subtly different "gospel" message for the one Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are eager to convey.

only when we see Jesus's death in its proper connection to this entire narrative, can we begin to resolve the questions we want to ask about what the early Christians actually meant.

Saying "It's true for you" sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it's twisting the word "true" to mean, not "a true revelation of the way things are in the real world," but "something that is genuinely happening inside you.

In what sense is the Bible authoritative in the first place? How can the Bible be appropriately understood and interpreted? How can its authority, assuming such appropriate interpretation, be brought to bear on the church itself, let alone on the world?

Reading backward in the light of the subsequent events, they interpreted the crucifixion as part of the strange, dark divine plan in which the shame and horror were part of the intended meaning. Jesus, they believed, had gone to the lowest point possible for a human being, never mind a Jew, never mind one whose followers had hoped he was the coming king.

The 'popular Paul' has all too often been addressing sixteenth-century questions in a nineteenth-century tone of voice

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

The Bible is a kind of spiritual Rorschach test: if you find you're cutting bits out, or adding bits in, it may be a sign that you're capitulating to cultural pressure.

Jesus as a "teacher" is much safer than Jesus as the gospels actually present him.

We see through a glass darkly, says St. Paul as he peers toward what lies ahead. All our language about future states of the world and of ourselves consists of complex pictures that may or may not correspond very well to the ultimate reality. But that doesn't mean it's anybody's guess or that every opinion is as good as every other one.

This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.

Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretative strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one's presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones.

Notoriously, the accounts of Easter do not fit snugly together.1 How many women went to the tomb, and how many angels or men did they meet there? Did the disciples meet Jesus in Jerusalem or Galilee or both? And so on. But, as with Cambridge in 1946, so with Jerusalem in a.d. 30 (or whenever it was): surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened.

The Christian churches in general have always been subject to the temptation to use the Bible to annotate the story we want to tell for ourselves, rather than allow the Bible to tell its own story and invite us to join in.