Quotes About Interpretation

Everything is music for the born musician.

Analogies are like lies.

Yes, in a woman, looks are the most important thing... But it's not how she looks 'to' us, so much as 'how she looks at' us.

Guardini recognized that the liturgy is the true, living environment for the Bible and that the Bible can be properly understood only in this living context within which it first emerged.

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.

questioning existing knowledge through a critical inquiry into evidence and its reading.

In contemporary times we not only reconstruct the past but we also use it to give legitimacy to the way in which we order our own society.

History is not just a directory of information; it also involves analyzing and interpreting this information.

The history of India was constructed in accordance with nineteenth century European views on what history should be and what was thought to be Indian history.

The political ideologues of the Hindu Right endorse a history rooted in colonial interpretations and are anxious to make that period of history a Hindu utopia.

The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained

If I'm in something funny, I like to try and find some kind of serious line in it that people can relate to.

When people read the Bible, they are trying to discern how they are to live.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

Bible translators must use their interpretive skills, remaining constantly sensitive to which nuance of meaning is being communicated by the original Hebrew or Greek word in a particular context so that the proper English word can be chosen to render that meaning.

Another translational problem is that many languages make use of idioms, or figures of speech, that mean something in the original language but not necessarily in the translated language.

Bible expositor J. Dwight Pentecost, one of my former professors at Dallas Theological Seminary, said that "the literal method of interpretation is that method that gives to each word the same exact basic meaning it would have in normal, ordinary, customary usage, whether employed in writing, speaking, or thinking. It is called the grammatical-historical method to emphasize the fact that the meaning is to be determined by both grammatical and historical considerations."1

The reality is that Bible translation is not an easy task.

The wise interpreter allows his knowledge of genres to control how he approaches each biblical passage. In this way, he can accurately determine what the biblical author was intending to communicate to the reader.

The well-known theologian Augustine adopted the point of view that Scripture, with the exception of prophecy, should be interpreted naturally and literally.

The interpretation of a specific passage must not contradict the total teaching of Scripture on a point. Individual verses do not exist as isolated fragments, but as parts of a whole. To interpret them properly, we must understand their relationship to the whole and to each other. Scripture interprets Scripture.

The book of Genesis was written by Moses between 1445 and 1405 BC and is foundational to a proper understanding of the rest of the Bible.

Writing that is only about a time is not literature, it is history.