Quotes about Interpretation

If you are alive on this planet, you are a counselor! You are interpreting life, and sharing those interpretations with others. You are a person of influence, and you are also being influenced.

First, we must learn to read the Bible with our heads, in order to understand what is actually, objectively, being said. And second, we must learn to read it with our hearts, in order to experience God's voice through its pages. By carefully studying the Bible, we come to understand what its writers were originally saying. And by prayerfully exploring it, we learn to discern what the Holy Spirit is saying to us now.

Thus, when we interpret the Old Testament correctly, without allegory or artificial manipulation but in accordance with Jesus's own teaching, the central message on every page is Christ. That does not mean that every verse taken by itself contains a hidden allusion to Christ, but that the central thrust of every passage leads us in some way to the central message of the gospel. II.

So, interpretation must proceed wholly by fitting those authors into their social and historical environments. Anything else is alleged to be a denial of history or a denial of humanity.

It was only many decades after his death that some historians began to interpret Washington's values and beliefs, more from their own frame of reference, rather than by the extensive writings and utterances of Washington during his lifetime.

Reading the Bible responsibly and respectfully today means learning what it meant for ancient Israelites to talk about God the way they did, and not pushing alien expectations onto texts written long ago and far away.

For Christians, then, the question is not "Who gets the Bible right?" The question is and has always been, "Who gets Jesus right?" The Gospel writers and Paul couldn't have made that any clearer.

Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.

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 its most extreme forms, making God look like us is what the Bible calls idolatry.

When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn't behave itself like a holy rulebook should.

The first question we should ask about what we are reading is not "How does this apply to me?" Rather, it is "What is this passage saying in the context of the book I am reading, and how would it have been heard in the ancient world?

Readers who come to the Bible expecting something more like an accurate textbook, a more-or-less objective recalling of the past—because, surely, God wouldn't have it any other way—are in for an uncomfortable read. But if they take seriously the words in front of them, they will quickly find that the Bible doesn't deliver on that expectation. Not remotely.