Quotes about Interpretation

We should not be surprised when we find ourselves in a similar spot, experiencing a God who is not beholden to our thinking, a God who doesn't act according to our sense of certainty, even if we can find a Bible verse or two to back it up. God can't be proof-texted. God will not be backed into a corner.

There's an irony: the passionate defense of the Bible as a "history book" among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn't really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us. In

followers of Jesus always have and always will meet Jesus and see him from where they are and they will experience Jesus differently as a result.

They were writing and reading these stories to understand their own relationship with God.

To see what Paul sees, Christians today are summoned to join Paul: the reality of Jesus demands that the Old Testament be read not by the book, but against the grain.

whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn't mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.

And again, the genius of the laws is their ambiguity, not their clarity, for their ambiguity is the very thing that allows them to gain new life with each passing year, ensuring that past and present forever remain connected and in dialogue.

The Pentateuch was not authored out of whole cloth by a second-millennium Moses but is the end product of a complex literary process—written, oral, or both—that did not come to a close until the postexilic period.

The Bible's diversity is the key to uncovering the Bible's true purpose for us.

And here is the absolutely vital and life-changing take-home point for us: ancient and ambiguous laws, in order to remain relevant, needed to be adapted—which results in the diversity of the laws we see in the Old Testament.

Andrew Perriman at "P.OST" (postnost.net).

And taking seriously the historically shaped biblical portrayal of a violent God drives us to ask for ourselves, "Is this what God is like?