Interpreting the Story (part I 02-26-16)

So how should one go about reading this story? How do we understand the Bible? Is it possible to know if what we understand is the correct understanding? Why is it that so many people come up with so many different interpretations of Scripture? And everyone thinks they’re right.

Think about the contrasting ways people approach the Bible. Some say, just read it, believe it, and obey it. Nothing else matters beyond that. Whatever it says, that’s God’s truth. This is a very literal approach and many people engage in it. Reading the Bible is very simple to them. No interpretation required other than reading the words and applying them.

The problem with this approach is that it ignores the fact when there is a document, such as the Bible, the reader has to interpret those words. Interpretation cannot be ignored. Human language requires interpretation. This is particularly true when the reader does not know the language in which the Bible was written—which is about 99 percent of readers—and must read a translation. So the issue isn’t whether or not scripture should be interpreted but what the quality of the interpretation is; good or bad.

The point is, when we sit down to read the Bible, we invariably bring to those texts all that we are, with all our experiences, culture, and prior biases toward various words and ideas. We can’t read in a vacuum. So that reality raises questions about whether or not we are reading and understanding what the authors intended to convey. The most strictly literal approach is not good enough to get to that heart.

Because God chose to speak His word through human words in history, every book and story recorded in the Bible has historical particularity and context. In other words, each document is conditioned by the language, time, and culture in which it was originally written (and in some cases also by the oral history it had before it was written down). This necessitates the need to interpret as accurately as possible. We can’t simply read the words and think that we will understand the points of the story unless we engage with the integrity of all that was brought to that story in the first place.