Quotes About Interpretation

the success of biblical interpretation depends a great deal on whether we want to listen to God or merely tell him what he ought to say. For it is only by listening to God - to what he says in all of Scripture, and through all avenues by which he might speak, such as the voices of the Spirit and of creation -that we can finally arrive at the best understanding of how the Spirit is directing us to love God and our neighbor.

We listen to the stories that people believe have shaped their lives. We listen to the stories people choose to tell, and the meaning they make of those stories.

I remind my American readers that biscuits in England and Australia are crispy flat things such as you call cookies, and the soft doughy things you call biscuits are what we call scones. And they say we speak the same language…

When people purposefully withhold meaning from one another, individually smart people can do collectively stupid things.

Nothing in this world is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Whatever. I'm pretty sure Mercutio was a vampire. He had the attitude, you know? He just never got a chance to show his fangs.

Nick demonstrated twenty-three ways of communicating without words by fanning himself with a napkin. "This one means oops, your fly is open, sir, and if you lower the fan a little and look at someone over the top of it, it means wow, I'd like to marry you. But if you do it the other way around, it means ha ha, we are now at war with Spain.

If writing has taught me anything, it's that you don't actually understand anything until you can express it in words.

People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believe that tragedy is romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believe it ironically.

The stone is not what I say it is. It's what you see in it.

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. —HERMAN MELVILLE

If we need to press creases in reality to make sense of the world around us - turn grey into black and white - then how, precisely, do we know where to run our irons?

Cine poate spune cu exactitate unde se termina culoarea violet si unde incepe cea portocalie intr-un curcubeu? Vedem deslusit diferentele dintre culori, dar unde anume incep ele dintr-una, in cealalta? La fel se intampla si cu luciditatea si nebunia.

interpretation, of course, is that, as some enlightened (and no doubt rather embittered) soul once pointed out, there is no such thing as a truly altruistic act. There is always, however well camouflaged in the darker recesses of our dense psychological undergrowth, an ulterior, self-serving, distinctly less honourable motive

Then I realized that I was falling victim to one of the fallacies of the bad reviewer (whose habits we already discussed at length in yesterday's commentary). I was wishing that Hamid had written a different book than he had. How I might have written this story is completely irrelevant. It would be like dismissing The Godfather because I wished it were a musical. The novel needs to be considered on its own terms.

The problem with history is that every story has multiple witnesses, but no witness ever has the entire truth.

I don't think it's ever fair for a reader to criticize an author for writing the book the novelist wanted to write, as opposed to the book the reader wished he had written.

Sola scriptura means at least this: that the church's proclamation is always subject to potential correction from the canon. It is for this reason that we resist simply collapsing the text into the tradition of its interpretation and performance.

The church is biblical, therefore, when it seeks to embody the words in the power of the Spirit and so become a living commentary. The church is thus not only the "people of the book" but also "the (lived) interpretation of the book.

North Americans think they know how to speak Christian, but what they say is actually a gross distortion. Either people do not know Christian words at all, or they have heard them but do not know what they mean, or they think they know what they mean when in fact they mean something completely different.

One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.

The writer crafts their ideal world. In my world, everyone has really long conversations or just picks apart pop culture to death and everyone talks in monologue.

Only someone who doesn't understand art tells an artist their art somehow failed. How the fuck can art fail? Art can't be graded, because it's going to mean something different to everyone. You can't apply a mathematical absolute to art because there is no one formula for self-expression.

The leaven of apostasy has spread to every developed nation. This makes modern culture more difficult to interpret in that there are both apostatizing trajectories and Christian roots intertwined within Western culture.