Quotes About Interpretation

There might be different ways of being dead. Like there are different ways of believing God.

Whether or not [a] story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl. A girl or a monster or both. Not everyone in a story gets a happy ending. Not everyone who reads a story feels the same way about how it ends. And if you go back to the beginning and read it again, you may discover it isn't the same story you thought you'd read. Stories shift their shape.

Every man is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of.

Weigh words, don't count 'em.

Recognizing that words are symbols for ideas and not the ideas themselves.

Some can read the writing on the wall.others put it there.

The necessity for a water-based canopy about the earth is not directly stated in the text. It is an interpretation of the text. Keep in mind that it is the text that is inspired, not our interpretations of it.

In Genesis 1, some have attempted to make a distinction between the expanse in which the birds fly (Genesis 1:2018) and the expanse in which the sun, moon, and stars were placed (Genesis 1:719); this was in an effort to have the sun, moon, and stars made in the second expanse. This is not a distinction that is necessary from the text, and is only necessary if a canopy is assumed.

We Christians must build all of our thinking in every area on the Bible. We must start with God's Word, not the word of finite, fallible man. We must judge what people say on the basis of what God's Word says—not the other way around.

Cave paintings done by Indians in America seem to clearly depict a dinosaur. Since scientists accept the mammoth drawings done by Indians, why not the dinosaur-like drawings? However, the evolutionary indoctrination that man didn't live at the same time as dinosaurs preclude evolutionary scientists even considering these drawings as dinosaurs that lived at the same time as the Indians.

has been speculated that the scapegoat represents Jesus taking away our sin. That is one possible interpretation. If the information given in the Mishnah is correct, another picture emerges. Two identical goats, one dedicated to God, the other dedicated to Satan.

To hell with facts! We need stories!

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

English is so past,' she said. 'Sure, we need people who can write about what we do, but they don't have to be English graduates. Theology graduates who don't believe any of it – that would be useful.

Communication is not only about words and numbers. Some thoughts can't be properly expressed in these ways at all. We also think in sounds and images, in movement and gesture, which gives rise to our capacities for music, visual arts, dance, and theater in all their variations.

Shakespeare's Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

A third way departs from the "open and affirming" and the "love the sinner, hate the sin" approach by regarding the question of whether and how the biblical prohibitions apply in the case of monogamous gay relationships as a "disputable matter" in the Romans 14-15 sense.

While the Bible does speak clearly on many matters—you'd have to be deaf not to hear the condemnations of murder, stealing, adultery, greed, etc.—there are, in fact, many questions at the margins of each of these, for which there are not clear answers. If you are not a pastor it's easier to maintain the comforting illusion that these hard cases are rare. But they are not.

If I say to some kids roughhousing in church, "Don't kill anyone," they know what concern I am addressing. They know I'm exaggerating for emphasis and not speaking in general terms—that I'm not, for example, commenting on the morality of military service. Stripped of the rich context we share, the mere words, "Don't kill anyone" could easily be understood to mean don't kill anyone, anytime, ever.

Virtually every church tradition, by theology, interpretive strategies, or pastoral practice, makes accommodations for divorced people who seek to remarry. These accommodations permit divorced people to enter unions that are outside the rule laid down in the Bible. But we can't have it both ways. We can't apply a strict "biblical marriage" rule to gay people and not apply it to those who are divorced and remarried.

What is needed is not sight, but insight—I need to look at your visual "impairment" and infer that my own impairment might be the same or worse.

Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

When finding that people held the same views as I, I persuaded myself that I held them differently.

The quickest way to demonstrate the sheer symbolicity of the negative is to look at any object, say, a table, and to remind yourself that, though it is exactly what it is, you could go on for the rest of your life saying all the things that it is not. "It is not a book, it is not a house, it is not Times Square," etc., etc.