Quotes About Interpretation

The New Testament is not a simple, homogeneous body of doctrine. It is, rather, a chorus of diverse voices. These voices differ not only in pacing and intonation but also in the material content of their messages. No matter how devoutly we might wish it otherwise, we cannot hear these texts as a chorus speaking in unison.

Unfortunately, the strategy is conceptually incoherent, because every jot and tittle of the New Testament is culturally conditioned. The effort to distinguish timeless truth in the New Testament from culturally conditioned elements is wrongheaded and impossible. These are texts written by human beings in particular times and places, and they bear the marks—as do all human utterances—of their historical location.

One consequence of this hermeneutical guideline is that interpretation of the New Testament cannot be performed by isolated individuals; the embodiment of the Word happens in the body of Christ, the church. Hermeneutics is necessarily a communal activity.29

It is not possible to use the just war tradition as a hermeneutical device for illuminating the New Testament, nor have the defenders of the tradition ordinarily even attempted to do so.

Those who can naively affirm the bumper-sticker slogan, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it," are oblivious to the question-begging inherent in the formulation: there is no escape from the imperative of interpreting the Word. Bumper-sticker hermeneutics will not do.

First, we should guard against falling into a habit of reading New Testament ethical texts in one mode only. If we read the New Testament and find only laws, we are obviously enmeshed in grave hermeneutical distortion. Likewise, if we read the New Testament and find only timeless moral principles, we are probably guilty, as Barth warned, of evading Scripture's specific claims upon our lives.

The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing.

His task is to proclaim the fulfilment of what God had revealed to the prophets of the past. The whole book is saturated with allusions to Old Testament prophecy, though there are no formal quotations. As a prophet himself, John need not quote his predecessors, but he takes up and reinterprets their prophecies, much as the later writers in the Old Testament prophetic tradition themselves took up and reinterpreted earlier prophecies.

the Bible contains the record of a dynamic, developing tradition of thought, and the aim of interpretation should be to let Scripture involve its reader in its own process of thought, so that the reader's own thinking may continue in the direction it sets

if we try to read it as prediction of how that judgment will occur we turn it into a confused muddle and miss its real point.

Misinterpretations of Revelation often begin by misconceiving the kind of book it is.

Esteem the church fathers and other writers, but value none of them as equivalent to the word of God.

I'd disagree with the characterisations of him as competitive (which I think was just misinterpretation of his ambition) or secretive (which I think is more about wanting to protect his team and his customers). Jeff [Bezos] could much more accurately be described as a naively optimistic geek than a calculating megalomaniac.

All ideas are second-hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them.

Actors and directors have written about it, psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, and even biologists have pondered it. What is acting, and how is it done? How does someone become someone else? Can someone become someone else? How much of what an actor does is due to that mysterious quality we call talent?

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

Our thoughts are unseen hands shaping the people we meet. Whatever we truly think them to be, that's what they'll become for us.

For a German and a Finn, the truth is the truth. In Japan and Britain it is all right if it doesn't rock the boat. In China there is no absolute truth. In Italy it is negotiable.

Whatever the culture, there's a tongue in our head. Some use it, some hold it, some bite it. For the French it is a rapier, thrusting in attack; the English, using it defensively, mumble a vague, confusing reply; for Italians and Spaniards it is an instrument of eloquence; Finns and East Asians throw you with constructive silence. Silence is a form of speech, so don't interrupt it!

In one recorded case, the English speaker said "I assume," the French interpreter translated it as "I deduce," and this was rendered by the Russian as "I consider"—by which time the idea of assumption had been lost!

What is said may be grammatically accurate or erroneous in the extreme, but it will be colored by the person's view of reality, which is itself influenced by the rigidity of his or her own language structure.

Americans using expressions like "You are killing me" or "Say that once again and I'll walk away from this deal" will cause great consternation among their Japanese partners.

the Zulu language has 39 words for green.

As is often true of biblical literature, it is up to the reader to hear and appraise the contradictory messages and then create from them a pattern of meaning that relates to the reader's particular situation.