Category Archives: Interpretation of Bible

The perils of Bible-reading

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Yes! There are some perils in reading the Bible. However, the most common dangers are also the most elementary, and with a little thought can readily be recognized and guarded against.

1. The peril of coming to the Bible with a mind already made up

No doubt we are all guilty at times of reading into the Bible our own favourite opinions and prejudices, rather than letting God’s word speak for itself. An early edition of the Living Bible (a modern paraphrase) gave Acts 13: 48 as follows: “—as many as wanted eternal life, believed.”…

“That’s just your interpretation!”

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Many people try to close down any discussion about the meaning of a Bible passage by saying, “Well, that’s just your interpretation.”  It’s as if ‘interpretation’ of the text is entirely personal and subjective.  You have your interpretation, and I have mine.  End of.

But, often, the meaning (interpretation) of a fact is just as important as the fact itself.

Consider the ‘fact’ of a driver flashing his headlights.  What does that mean?  Well, in the UK it usually means, “You go first”  (and yes, I know that the Highway Code says something different).  …

Yes, I must learn how to interpret the Bible

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Based on:

Carson, D. A. ―Must I Learn How to Interpret the Bible?  Modern Reformation 5:3 (May/June
1996): 18–22. Updated 2003.

What parts of the Bible are binding mandates for us, what what parts are not?

  • Should we ‘greet one another with a holy kiss’?
  • Should we wash one another’s feet?
  • If the answer to the preceding question is ‘No’, why do we follow the Lord’s command, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’?
  • Should we execute adulters by stoning?
…

1 Corinthians 4:1 – ‘under-rowers’?

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4:1 One should think about us this way—as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.

The word ‘servants’, ‘hyperetas’, is thought to be derived from ‘eresso’, ‘to row’ and ‘hypo’, ‘below’, and thus to mean (‘literally’) ‘under-rower’.  Lay preachers and popular writers tend to make much of this.  Wiersbe, for example, writes:

‘The word translated ministers is literally “under-rowers.” It described the slaves who rowed the huge Roman galleys.

…

Cross Vision 3 – A cruciform through-line

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Summarising chapter 3 of Greg Boyd’s Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence (Fortress Press, 2017).

What do we think about a wife who is repeatedly and viciously attacked by her husband, and yet stands by him because she is convinced that ‘He loves me’.

Why do so many Christians confess that ‘God is love’ and yet believe that he does hurtful things to people (such as predestining large numbers of them to eternal punishment)?…

Slavery: the need for a redemptive-movement hermeneutic

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What are we to make of the Old Testament texts that speak of slavery?  They do not offer any outright condemnation of it.  So, are we to reject those texts out of hand?

One answer, favoured by many who wish to uphold the authority of Scripture, is to regard these texts as less-than-ultimate in themselves, and pointing towards (without themselves arriving at) the ultimate.

These texts, in other words, are on a trajectory, the end point of which is reached in ‘the law of Christ’, which is the ‘law of love’, and, eventually, to the abolition of slavery.…

Jeremiah 29:11 – “I have plans to prosper you”

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Jer 29:11 – ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.’

This verse is one of the most beloved in the Bible.  But it has all too often been taken out of context and therefore misapplied.  In other words, too many forget that a Scripture like this, although written for us, is not written to us.

As always, context is king:

’29:10 “For the LORD says, ‘Only when the seventy years of Babylonian rule are over will I again take up consideration for you.

…

Ash: How to pray the psalms in Christ

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Christopher Ash, in Teaching Psalms, Vol 1, has developed a case for interpreting and preaching the Psalms in a rigorously Christ-centred way.

He espouses the view that all the psalms are ‘about, for, or to the Anointed King (Messiah).’

My initial reaction to this proposal was twofold:

(a) Yes, I want to exalt Christ in every possible way, and therefore to celebrate an approach that is thoroughly Christ-centred.

(b) But I suspected that Ash’s approach is actually quite restricted, in inhibiting a Trinitarian reading of the Psalms and in (potentially) leading to a neglect of their original meaning. …

Mind the gap

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In The Hermeneutical Spiral, Grant Osborne discusses the issue of ‘distanciation’ (the cultural gap that exists between biblical times and today.  Preachers have devised a number of erroneous approaches, including:

  1. Literalistic preaching assumes God automatically bridges the gap and preaches the text as if it were written for today. Normally this is accompanied by a lack of serious effort to understand the text, resulting in shallow, subjective sermons.
  2. Allegorizing…assumes that beneath the literal, surface meaning lies the “real” meaning, such as the Song of Songs as a picture of Christ and the church.
…

More urban legends of the Old Testament

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Having compiled a couple of sets relating to texts in the New Testament, I thought I’d take a look at some commonly-misunderstood texts from the Old Testament.  These are discussed more fully in the Bible Study Notes.

Here’s a start:-

Genesis 1 – is there a ‘gap’ between verses 1 and 2?

Genesis 18 – Abraham’s three visitors.  Christian piety, both old and new, has often seen in the story of Abraham’s three visitors a picture of the three persons of the Trinity. …