Quotes about Interpretation

So he had them into the slaughter house, where was a butcher killing a sheep. And behold, the sheep was quiet and took her death patiently. Then said the Interpreter, You must learn of this sheep to suffer, and put up wrongs without murmurings and complaints. Behold how quietly she takes her death! And without objecting she suffereth her skin to be pulled over her ears. Your King doth call you his sheep.

You Know what, sometimes it seems to me we've living in a world that fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves...And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problems is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

The only wrong way to read the Bible is to not read it at all.

A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story—in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.

If one Egyptian tailor hadn't cheated on the threads of Joseph's mantle, Potiphar's wife would never have been able to tear it, present it as evidence to Potiphar that Joseph attacked her, gotten him thrown in prison, and let him be in a position to interpret Pharaoh's dream, win his confidence, advise him to store seven years of grain, and save his family, the seventy original Jews from whom Jesus came. We owe our salvation to a cheap Egyptian tailor.

Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.

Stories and images can be powerful means for conveying ideas. Every time we read a book or watch a movie, we enter into an imaginative

If we think of the gospel as simply rolling right off the Old Testament tongue, we will be wrong. And we will fail to appreciate how creative the New Testament writers were in working out the day-to-day real-time implications of all of this.

“What is written in the Law?” Jesus replied. “How do you read it?”

its legs were iron, and its feet were part iron and part clay.