On behalf of myself, my ego, superego and id, we welcome you!
> Now that I've given my bit about what I believe I think I'd like
> to jump right into the dicussions at hand.
> Oliver Beck in his last letter wrote about the interpretation of
> the Bible. He talked about the "clear" interpretation. He said that
> many objections to interpretations are because of our sinfulness, that
> we don't want to accept what God is saying. He also said that if we
> understand a passage we shouldn't say "there might be another
> interpretation" and not accept what we've come to understand.
> One thing that is certain is that biblical interpretation or any
> interpretation is hard. Language is often seen as being very plain and
> simple, but it really isn't. Meanings change and especially with ancient
> languages it is hard to figure out what certain sayings meant. Of course
> our knowledge of what life was like back then is very important in this
> issue.
> I remember a few times when my mother was telling me how a
> certain passage really affected her and my dad would cut in and say
> "that's not what the passage was saying". This is an example of how
> different people's understanding of the Bible can be. Does Oliver's
> principle still apply? How can it if different people get different
> understandings of the same passage? Does the passage have a specific
> meaning or is something different from everyone? It's not understanding
This one is near and dear to my heart. When working on biblical
interpretation, one thing needs to be kept clearly in mind. A
proper interpretation does two things:
1) Assigns one, and only one, meaning to a passage. That meaning is
the
meaning assigned by the author, not by anything or anyone else.
This
does NOT preclude the Holy Spirit's APPLYING it differently to a
need
in your life than he does in mine (i.e. multiple applications) but
it
does preclude more than one intrinsic "meaning" unless ...
2) The original author &/or God, in scripture, assigns a second
meaning
to that passage. One of the prerogatives of diety &/or authorship
is
the authority to assign secondary meanings to your work. Nobody
else
ever has the authority to do that -- ESPECIALLY well-intentioned
Bible
students!!! <grin>
If you don't keep a firm grasp on this, you'll start calling some
things
helicopters that the prophet Joel called bugs. (Don't laugh, it's
been
done!)
Suggested reading: "Understanding and Applying the Bible" by
Robertson
McQuilkin, ISBN 0-8024-9091-3. Amazon (www.amazon.com) carries it.
It
was the text for the Hermeneutics class when I was at Columbia Bible
College and is used at a variety of other Bible Colleges. There are
others that go into more depth, but McQuilkin would be my
overwhelming
choice for laymen (doesn't require Greek.) I'm currently using it in
a
church Sunday School class.
You said well when you said,
> One thing that is certain is that biblical interpretation or any
> interpretation is hard.
If it were easy, *everyone* would be doing it (correctly!)
Acts 20:32,
jbt
-- ******************************************************************** John B. Tant http://wwwp.exis.net/~jtant jtant@exis.net ** ** Find out more about the Declaration! ** http://www.Declaration.net/ ** ** The opinions I express are my own, not my employer's ** http://www.infi.net/~stonebdg ********************************************************************