Quotes About Interpretation

My third note is that when we therefore use scripture in little bits, cut off from their proper context and made to dance to our tunes instead, all sorts of doubts can creep in, like weeds among the wheat.

make sure we are doing justice and honour to scripture itself, rather than simply using it within schemes of our own making.

This makes the rather obvious logical mistake analogous to that of a soldier who, receiving orders through the mail, concludes that the letter carrier is his commanding officer. Those who transmit, collect and distribute the message are not in the same league as those who write it in the first place.

Since we cannot stop reading the gospels without ceasing to be proper Christians, we have developed all kinds of strategies for making alternative sense of the gospels and so screening out the dangerous and challenging picture they are actually sketching. That is at the heart of the problem I have been trying to identify.

Unless we are prepared to see these events – the Jesus-events, the messianic moment – as the ultimate call to penitence, because they are the ultimate announcement of the arrival of God's kingdom, we will be bound to over-interpret other events to compensate.

Rereading some of these writers, one is tempted to say that if anyone needed help to struggle against some of the unfortunate things they committed to paper, it was not Paul, but some of his twentieth-century interpreters.

Put tradition first, and scripture will be muzzled and faded. Put scripture first, and tradition will come to new life. Better

It all becomes so complicated, people grumble—when what they really mean is, "I am so used to reading this passage one way that I find it hard to switch and consider other options.

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex. But

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

The creative act is not pure.

The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.

So everything is something else.

Hattatin biri üç ayri tarzda yazi yazarmis: Birincisini kendisi okuyabilirmis ama baskalari okuyamazmis, ikincisini hem kendisi hem de baskalari okuyabilirmis, üçüncüsünu ne kendisi okuyabilirmis ne de baÅŸkalar?. O üçüncü hat, benim.

He understands evil better than any other person I've ever known. We disagree in how to eliminate it, but we do not disagree that it exists.

conclusions from his dreams, he thought the next morning as he dressed

Mid-range, androgynous voice. I first thought that Solaris was a guy. Then a girl. Maybe. Then I gave up trying to figure out which. It would become obvious at some point, or not.

If you say the same word a million times will it lose its meaning?

The problem, of course, is that languages are not only languages. They're also worldviews -- and therefore, to some extent, untranslatable ...

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

What separates history from myth is that history takes in the whole picture, whereas myth averts our eyes from the truth when it turns men into heroes and gods.

The compression of history, the winnowing of history, may seem natural and neutral, but it is decidedly not. It is the means by which grade schools history becomes our standard adult history.

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

What also excites me is that the artist attempts with the visual what I attempt to do with words: stop time, create a moment, and celebrate the process.