Quotes about Interpretation

The necessity for a water-based canopy about the earth is not directly stated in the text. It is an interpretation of the text. Keep in mind that it is the text that is inspired, not our interpretations of it.

In Genesis 1, some have attempted to make a distinction between the expanse in which the birds fly (Genesis 1:2018) and the expanse in which the sun, moon, and stars were placed (Genesis 1:719); this was in an effort to have the sun, moon, and stars made in the second expanse. This is not a distinction that is necessary from the text, and is only necessary if a canopy is assumed.

We Christians must build all of our thinking in every area on the Bible. We must start with God's Word, not the word of finite, fallible man. We must judge what people say on the basis of what God's Word says—not the other way around.

Cave paintings done by Indians in America seem to clearly depict a dinosaur. Since scientists accept the mammoth drawings done by Indians, why not the dinosaur-like drawings? However, the evolutionary indoctrination that man didn't live at the same time as dinosaurs preclude evolutionary scientists even considering these drawings as dinosaurs that lived at the same time as the Indians.

Reason is the natural order of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Does everything always have to mean something else?" I ask before we get started. Who knew that literature was so tangled and complicated? "That is a wonderful lesson, Sang Ly. Remember it." "What was it again?" I ask, not certain to what she was referring. She repeats it for me. "In literature, everything means something.

But literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together—and, quite frankly, they often don't get along.

The puzzling thing is that there is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time....

We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

Practical experience and accurate observation show that one cannot influence one's own dreams. There are people, it is true, who assert that they can influence them. But if you look into their dream material, you find that they do only what I do with my disobedient dog: I order him to do those things I notice he wants to do anyhow, so that I can preserve my illusion of authority.

Man can live the most amazing things if they make sense to him. But the difficulty is to create that sense.

all eschatological interpretation of history, when united to a strong religious mentality cannot but produce the finest practical theological fruitage.