Quotes About Interpretation

we need to learn to tell the story that makes sense of Jesus. Not a story that we ask Jesus to fit into.

This entire book—don't forget this please—is for each of those seven churches. Every vision, every interlude, every song is for each of them.

Flannery O'Connor—it's right, but it ain't right enough.

Christopher Rowland, who has plumbed apocalyptic literature as well as anyone in the modern era, counters much of the common interpretation of Revelation when he says, "We should not ask of apocalypses, what do they mean? Rather, we should ask, how do the images and designs work? How do they affect us and change our lives?

God did not give the Bible in order that we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we've mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible. Of course, I think we should read the Bible and know it—but it is the specific element of reading for mastery versus reading to be mastered that grows out of this shortcut.

The question we need to ask today is this, and this question strikes to the heart of how we read the Bible: Do we seek to retrieve that cultural world and those cultural expressions, or do we live the same gospel in a different way in a different day?

But the danger is obvious: those who take this approach more often than not end up denying the potency of the Sermon and sometimes simply turn elsewhere—to Galatians and Romans and Ephesians—for their Christian ethical instruction. What many such readings of the Sermon really want is Paul, and since they can't find Paul in the Sermon, they reinterpret the Sermon and give us Paul instead.

They set the kindling afire to consume the body of a man who had but one goal—to make the Bible readable for everyone.

Two things resulted from this "follow Torah by adding rules" approach. The first one is that Jesus thought this completely misunderstood how to do Torah. The second, which follows from the first one, is that an increasing number of ordinary folks were cut off from their faith.

The test results also suggest that, even though we like to think we are becoming more like Jesus, the reverse is probably more the case: we try to make Jesus like ourselves. Which means, to one degree or another, we are all Rorschachers; we all project onto Jesus our own image.

Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.

Sometimes in our zeal to "apply" a text, we fail to read the text in its context. And more often than we may all care to admit, our frustrations over how to apply a text can be completely resolved with a more accurate interpretation.

Some people read the Bible as if its passages were Rorschach inkblots. They see what is in their head. In more sophisticated language, they project onto the Bible what they want to see.

It is a fact that many statements about what the Bible says are derived from contextless exegeses of a former generation

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it is the parts I do understand." Whoever said that may well have been thinking about Matthew 5 or even our specific passage.

In his book The Indelible Image, New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III reiterates a common piece of interpretive wisdom: "A text without a context is just a pretext for what we want it to mean.

But Augustine knew the Bible's main mission: so that we can become people who love God and love others. If our reading of the Bible leads to this, the mission is accomplished. If it isn't …

I keep hearing the argument that some things are constitutional while other things are not. The idea is that we should be in favor of all the things that were decided over two hundred years ago by a bunch of slave-owning cross-dressers who pooped in holes.

The difference between Christianity and Islam is that some people think a guy walked on water and other people think a horse can fly.

History creates context; context creates meaning.

Earlier than most, Lawrence seemed to embrace the modern concept that history was malleable, that truth was what people were willing to believe.

In religious thought, a person may ride a horse into the sky (Mohammed), ascend to heaven in a chariot of fire (Elijah), rise to the stars in a carriage drawn by six dragons (Huang Ti, the founder of the Chinese empire), or gain knowledge and afterlife in passing through the digestive tract of a feathered serpent (Maya kings). In

Two primary criticisms have been raised of postmodernism.16 The first is to insist that just because one sees the world through a particular set of lenses (or biases), it does not mean that he or she is incapable of rationality or objectivity. It may make being rational and objective more difficult, but it does not make it impossible.

Either we don't read the things we claim we do, or we read them with incompetence, preventing ideas in the book from changing our behavior.