Quotes about Interpretation

It all becomes so complicated, people grumble—when what they really mean is, "I am so used to reading this passage one way that I find it hard to switch and consider other options.

Only those who have tried to understand and expound the Bible, and especially Paul as a man of his own day, only those who have happily escaped the dangers which threaten us on these two sides (exposition and application), are entitled to cast the first stone.

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex. But

Frank Sheed once said, "The secular novelist sees what is visible; the Christian novelist sees what is there.

When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.

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 everything is historically relative, then so is the idea of historicism itself.

And if there is no objective or universal truth, then any claim to have objective truth will be treated as nothing but an attempt by one interpretive community to impose its own limited, subjective perspective on everyone else. An act of oppression. A power grab.

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

A skeptic once said to me, 'I don't believe the Bible because it has miracles.' I said, 'Name one.' He said, 'Turning water into wine. Do you believe that?' I said, 'Yeah, it happens all the time.' He said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'Well, rain goes through the grapevine up into the grape, and the grape turns into wine. All Jesus did was speed it up a little bit.

you ought not judge" is itself a judgment! (Pluralists misinterpret Jesus' comments on judging [Matt. 7:1-5]. Jesus did not prohibit judging as such, only judging hypocritically.)

The world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully. But also that by telling the story of the world, we are changing the world. That is why God created the letters of the alphabet, that we might have the opportunity to narrate to him what he created. Reb Mordke always chuckled at this. "God is blind. Did you not know that?" he would say. "He created us that we would be his guides, his five senses.