Quotes About Interpretation

Much in life is simply a matter of perspective. It's not inherently good or bad, a success or failure; it's how we choose to look at things that makes the difference.

biblical inerrancy.

meanings" of the Bible so many people point to in their attempts to oppress other people.

It seems ironic to acknowledge that a Catholic Mass almost certainly contains more Scripture than the average evangelical service.

The Bible cannot be the primary source of knowledge and criterion of truth in all areas of importance.

other ways of knowing—indeed, other ways of hearing God address us. These include tradition, science, reason, experience, intuition, community, and relationships. The power of a narrow evangelical biblicism must be broken, but you can't replace something with nothing.

No two people see things the same.

The Bible had become a compendium of 'proof-texts', picked out at will and used to support almost anything a preacher wanted

metaphor' itself is not a static, ahistorical term; it is not as though there is a pervasive, universal concept of metaphor which can be applied, like a template, to all ages and cultures.

Even the rose, with its traditional connotations of fragrance and purity, can appear in different situations, which underlines the very important point that metaphor is primarily contextual.

For metaphor, we may suggest, is not simply a matter of what appears on the printed page or in, for example, the work of visual art; it is rather the bodying-forth [stet] of sets of correspondences of which, in some sense, we have all, in specific interpretative communities, been aware in what we might define as a liminal way, hovering somewhere around the threshold of articulation.

metaphor is never static, and rarely innocent.

Perhaps all play is metaphor, perhaps all metaphor is play.

Thus, one might say, the dream can never be read literally, because its very substance is metaphor...

metaphor have something in common with, for example, the paintings of M.C.Esher, or the Rorshach blot, both of which are famously indecipherable or, at least, irreducible to a single interpretation: they can never fully reveal their own meanings because they are perennially on the point of turning into their other.

The metaphor can be considered in some sense and under some circumstances to be a kind of sleight of hand by means of which meanings can be surreptitiously smuggled into an apparently innocent discourse.

A metaphor then, we might reasonably surmise, is not necessarily a matter of simple one-to-one equivalences ('this stands for that'), but neither is it a process of ornamentation of something that could have been more clearly said in another, simpler way; rather, in this case at least […] it is the very substance of the discourse.

A common error about metaphor is to suppose that it can be in some sense 'unpacked'. When that unpacking takes place, what is left is rarely of any value; it seems a paltry and colourless thing when compared to the metaphor itself.

Does metaphor mean something more than, or different form, or in some sense beneath, what it appears to say; or is the meaning of a metaphor precisely what it does say.

History is a fable agreed upon.

sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych

You have to understand the tone of the movie, because if it's supposed to be funny, it can be funny violent like the Home Alone stuff, but you have to really understand the tone of what you're doing and make the action work for that and for the character.

Some preachers use the Bible the way a drunk uses a lamp post . . . more for support than for illumination.

Our problem today is that we no longer believe in things but in symbols, hence our life has passed over into these symbols and their manipulation— only to find ourselves manipulated by the symbols we take so seriously, objectified in our objectifications.