Quotes about Meaning

Christopher Rowland, who has plumbed apocalyptic literature as well as anyone in the modern era, counters much of the common interpretation of Revelation when he says, "We should not ask of apocalypses, what do they mean? Rather, we should ask, how do the images and designs work? How do they affect us and change our lives?

If you want to know how Jesus understands the Christian life, the place to begin is with what he means by kingdom of God.

Thus, see Old Testament texts like Pss 68:5; 103:13—14; Isa 63:15—16; Jer 31:9, 20, the famous avinu malkeinu ("Our Father, our King") lines in classic Jewish prayers, like Ahabah Rabah and The Litany for the New Year, and texts like 4Q372 fragment 1:16.

Revelation "is not about a rapture out of this world but about faithful discipleship in this world.

Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.

Sometimes in our zeal to "apply" a text, we fail to read the text in its context. And more often than we may all care to admit, our frustrations over how to apply a text can be completely resolved with a more accurate interpretation.

It is a fact that many statements about what the Bible says are derived from contextless exegeses of a former generation

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it is the parts I do understand." Whoever said that may well have been thinking about Matthew 5 or even our specific passage.

In his book The Indelible Image, New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III reiterates a common piece of interpretive wisdom: "A text without a context is just a pretext for what we want it to mean.

he's incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while.

Today we continue a never ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.

Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place — to one friend rather than another and one shire more that all the land.