Where bad science and hermeneutics intersect

If we believe that the same God who created asn evolving universe is revealed in an evolving Bible, we can derive some fascinating insights from contemporary studies of genetics. Today's chickens, it turns out, still have the genetic information in their DNA that was used to produce long tails, scales, and teeth in their ancestors the dinosaurs. During embryonic development, some of those primitive dinosaur characteristics still manifest themselves in chicken. (Human embryos similarly have stages where they sport gills and tails, so it is said that our ontogeny recapitulates our phylogeny.) We might say that the Bible similarly retains the record of its own evolution, and in our individual spiritual development we may personally recapitulate earlier stages.

Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 273.

It is tough to even know where to start with this quote. Do you start with the hopelessly outdated (Contemporary? Really?) and abandoned arguments for evolutation based on embryology? (I always knew that dinosaurs had something to do with my spiritual formation. I just could never figure out precisely what. Thanks!) Do you start with the retreaded developmental hypotheses of source criticism? I have not read the entire book in question, so I don't want to be unfair or uncharitable to McLaren, but I was under the impression that he was a prominant voice for the emerging movement. So why is he acting so modern by restating all of their old arguments?

Biblical Inerrancy and the Licona Controversy, Christian News

Christianity Today just wrote up a brief article concerning the controversy swirling around Michael Licona and his interpretation of Matthew 27:51-54 in his 700 page volume defending the historical, physical resurrection of Jesus, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. You can read more about the controversy - as well as a critique of Licona's interpretation here: Biblical Inerrancy and the Licona Controversy, Christian News. Personally, it's sad that what is widely acknowledged (even by Licona's critics) to be a very capable, thorough, and orthodox work is being called into question simply because he offers a symbolic/apocalyptic interpretation of four verses from Matthew which have caused scholars to scratch their heads for years.

The issue, of course, is bigger than this particular text. The issue is has really become about Licona's committment to the innerancy of scripture and what it means to believe that scripture is "without error." Can a person hold to the inerrancy of scripture without adopting a rigid literalism regarding certain texts? The above article quotes the Chicago statement on inerrancy:

Article XVIII of the Chicago Statement makes this point with precision: “We
affirm that the text of the Scripture is to be interpreted by
grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and
devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture. We deny the legitimacy of
any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to
relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its
claims to authorship.” Furthermore, the Chicago Statement requires that “history
must be treated as history.”

But this quote highlights a problem faced regularly in our exegesis of an inerrant text. A committment to grammatico-historical exegesis requires that we do in fact take into account the literary forms and devices of scripture - including figurative or symbolic language. Most everyone would agree that Jehovah's Witnesses are not being faithful to the intent of scripture to take the number 144,000 literally in the book of Revelation. But it's pretty noncontroversial (in most circles) to identify the language of Revelation as largely symbolic. But what about other genres like the gospels?  Licona isn't questioning whether the text of Matthew 27 is true. He's questioning whether or not a literalistic interpretation is faithful to the text's intent. It's not as simple as saying, "I believe in inerrancy, so therefore, I believe the text to be literally true." The word "literally" has been smuggled into the definition and has had the effect of dramatically changing the definition. The bumper sticker cliche "The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it." may sound good to some. But it is not only naive, it also (ironically) undermines the authority of the text.  A committment to inerrancy actually calls us to study and discuss the literary meaning of a text not just the literal meaning of a text.  A committment to inerrancy calls us to robust and humble hermeneutics where Christians may actually disagree with how to take certain texts while agreeing theologically with each other about what scripture is. We simply disagree with the best way to understand it.

Maybe Licona's right and maybe he's wrong on this text.  But what this controversy reveals is the danger of a simplistic and overly literalistic understanding of inerrancy.  It is frightening that some are calling for him to be kicked out of the ETS simply because he doesn't walk lock-step (on this ONE text) with this rigid definition of inerrancy. My goodness. Is this all that it takes for us to disfellowship each other? Have mercy. (It's worth noting, by the way, that Licona is now rather agnostic about the text in question. He says that it may be literal or figurative. But apparently that's not good enough for some of his inquisitors.) I am committed to inerrancy, but it's no wonder that so many young theologians and students are so cynical about this whole issue in light of these types of witch hunts.

A contemporary discussion on inerrancy and authority...

What role should the Bible have in society? A panel discussion with Tim Keller, Alister McGrath, and Brian McLaren. It's well worth a watch.

How do you say "balls of gold" in French? - Fiction - Salon.com

How do you say "balls of gold" in French? - Fiction - Salon.com

This is a nice article on the difficulties and subtleties of translating fiction while attempting to remain faithful to the author's intended meaning.

My favorite line: “You start with a text just like a musician starts with a composition, a work of music. And then your job is to play it for the listener so that they hear what the composer or the author intended. It takes a lot of practice to be able to do that.”

Catholic Hermeneutics

Vatican cardinal warns priests not to let humanity overshadow God :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

This article, summarizing an address given by Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, offers a nice summary of a contemporary Catholic understanding of the place of sacred tradition and sacred scripture. "Scripture without tradition would be an historical book, and history tells us what others think, while theology seeks to tell us about God." I particularly loved this line from the Cardinal: "Nothing creates culture like the proclamation of the Word. In other words, it creates a new way of envisioning life, relationships, society, and even politics. The more evangelical this new way is, the more we discover how deeply and surprisingly it corresponds to the human heart."

Tribal Metanarrative

I include this video not for political reasons. I am no fan of Harry Belafonte - his music or his politics. I think that his viewpoint is caustic, dismissive, and laughable if it wasn't so racist.  I am also no fan of Henry Cain. I do typically vote conservative in most elections, but I simply don't know enough about Cain to have an informed opinion on him. I also don't believe that Belafonte represents the thoughts of most or even many African-Americans. His views are on the extreme fringe. The reason why I linked to this video is because of what it demonstrates. It demonstrates the dangers of the type of tribalistic thinking that often accompanies liberationist theologies. Tribalistic thinking allows us to handily separate people into "good blacks" and "bad blacks," "good women" and "bad women," "good evangelicals" and "bad evangelicals," etc. based on how faithful an individual is to the accepted narrative of their tribe. If you occupy a certain tribe (or rather, as is most often the case, if I have placed you into a certain tribe independant of your personal feelings), then you must think, act, and talk in a certain way in order to be "good." In this case, it turns blackness into nothing more than an ideology or dogma.

http://youtu.be/5fxjQ5h6Ri4

Scripture as missional and identity-shaping

The best way to describe Scripture is that it is identity-shaping. The Bible tells us who we are, where we are, and where we are going. In fact, its identity-shaping, Spirit-mentored direction propels its readers into a missional life. Eugene Peterson warns of the danger of making the Bible after our own Trinitarian image: my Holy Wants, Holy Needs, and Holy Feelings. Instead, if we read the Bible aright, we are remade--since the Bible as been sent as a word from God to us--into God's image, the perfect Eikon, Jesus Christ...

...This is what it is meant by Scripture being missional: Scripture is designed by God to work its story into persons of God so that they may become doers of the good.  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create restored Eikons who are in union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world. Scripture, I somethings have to tell myself, is not designed just to be exegeted and probed and pulled apart until it yields its (gnostic-like) secrets to those who know its languages and its interpretative traditions and who can then divulge their gleanings behind pulpits on Sunday mornings or in monographs and academic journals (very few care to read).  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create missional people who learn from their missional praxis how to see Scripture as amissional text that shapes them so that they can live in the story that the church tells in Scripture.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 146-147.

Bibliolatry

Telford Work, a gifted scholar, makes just this point:

While the Bible is basic to Christianity, it is also marginal--in that God alone occupies the center of the faith, and that both belief in God and the believing community predate and will succeed Scripture's present form and roles.

At the center of the Christian faith is the Trinity, and the gospel and atonement are about restoring cracked Eikons to this Trinitarian God. Beginning our understanding of Scripture with the Trinity is to claim the personal nature of everything Christian.  Whenever the Bible replaces the Trinity, we have bibliolatry. The first Christians believed that God's story entered a new chapter with Jesus, and they were living in that story before they sat down to write it.  So we need to get this straight: our faith finds expression in Scripture but that faith is in the Trinitarian God and not in the Bible.  Our faith is in the Bible in the sense that in it we hear the Trinitarian God whom we have come to know.  I do not think that we can know the Trinitarian God apart from what we learn of him through the church's Bible, but even conceding this allows us to keep God front and center in terms of what Scripture is.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 143

The Double-Love Hermeneutic

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all.  Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way...However...if he is deceived in an interpretation which builds up charity...he is deceived in the same way as a man who leaves a road by mistake but passes through a field to the same place toward which the road itself leads.

Augustine in On Christian Doctrine from Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement, 142

Hans Boersma on Metaphor

Metaphors are a divinely given means to avoid idolatrous claims of knowledge. Metaphors are nonliteral descriptions of reality.  They are an acknowledge that we need to access the world around us in an indirect fashion, and that the idea of direct and complete access is an arrogant illusion that violates the multifaceted integrity of the created world.

in Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 39.

McKnight on Metaphor

Metaphor is more than ornamental decoration on a more fundamental propositional reality, more than a homey story in a sermon or a cleaver picture to illustrate a point.  Metaphors need not be stripped of their literary beauty to discover under them their propositional reality. Au contraire: metaphor is not a linguistic stage rehearsal but the performance itself. Anthony Thiselton claims in New Horizons in Hermeneutics: "Metaphor produces new possibilities of imagination and vision; narrative creates new configurations which structure individual or corporate experience."  Again, Thiselton: "If metaphor, therefore, present possibility rather than actuality it is arguable that metaphoric discourse can open up new understanding more readily than purely descriptive or scientific statement." The effect of seeing metaphor as possibility is that metaphors are not in need of decoding or unpacking but of indwelling. Said another way, by receiving the metaphor into the soul, the soul learns the reality. THus, we not only indwell the metaphor, the metaphor indwells us. The charitable, loving approach to a metaphor is to let it have its way with us, and only by surrendering to it does it yield its truth.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 37.

Southern Baptists and the NIV 2011

In a major, but not unexpected move, the SBC has taken an official stance against the NIV(2011) primarily for its use of gender-inclusive language.  I don't doubt that some of their concerns are in fact legitimate.  Anyone who doesn't have any concern about a given translation is either ignorant of the messiness of doing translation work or is simply hopelessly dogmatic (see the whole "KJV only" subculture within Christendom).  That being said, the SBC's decision is silly.  It seems as if our politics is showing.  Because of a pervasive paranoia about feminism and liberal political speech taking over culture at large and our churches in particular, many have come to see gender-neutral language as a vast left-wing conspiracy.  This strikes me as ridiculous.  When Paul addresses the brothers of a church, are we to believe that he was only addressing the men of the church (or even men of a certain age and theological disposition)?  The goal of translation is to faithfully take (in this case) an ancient text and allow it to speak to a new culture and a new time.  The task of translation is never finished because culture and language is never finished changing.  We must never stop critiquing our translations - especially those of us who preach/teach.  But we should also be very careful that we don't turn or favorite translations (or even the Bible itself!) into an idol that actually gets in the way of Christ.

Here is the SBC resolution (with thanks to Scot McKnight):

WHEREAS, Many Southern Baptist pastors and laypeople have trusted and used the 1984 New International Version (NIV) translation to the great benefit of the Kingdom; and
WHEREAS, Biblica and Zondervan Publishing House are publishing an updated version of the New International Version (NIV) which incorporates gender neutral methods of translation; and

WHEREAS, Southern Baptists repeatedly have affirmed our commitment to the full inspiration and authority of Scripture (2 Timothy 3:15-16) and, in 1997, urged every Bible publisher and translation group to resist “gender-neutral” translation of Scripture; and

WHEREAS, This translation alters the meaning of hundreds of verses, most significantly by erasing gender-specific details which appear in the original language; and
WHEREAS, Although it is possible for Bible scholars to disagree about translation methods or which English words best translate the original languages, the 2011 NIV has gone beyond acceptable translation standards; and

WHEREAS, Seventy-five percent of the inaccurate gender language found in the TNIV is retained in the 2011 NIV; and

WHEREAS, The Southern Baptist Convention has passed a similar resolution concerning the TNIV in 2002; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, June 14-15, 2011 express profound disappointment with Biblica and Zondervan Publishing House for this inaccurate translation of God’s inspired Scripture; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we encourage pastors to make their congregations aware of the translation errors found in the 2011 NIV; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we respectfully request that LifeWay not make this inaccurate translation available for sale in their bookstores; and be it finally

RESOLVED, That we cannot commend the 2011 NIV to Southern Baptists or the larger Christian community

The NIV is the Antichrist!!

Foundations Only a Few Can Build

This is a sermon that was preached by Dr. Robert Lowery of Lincoln Christian Seminary in chapel services on Feb. 8, 2001. Dr. Lowery was a passionate communicator and devoted student of God's word - as this sermon so clearly illustrates. Through his many years of service in the seminary, Dr. Lowery positively impacted the lives and the ministries of thousands - including my own. My own teaching ministry owes a huge debt of gratitude to Dr. Lowery's influence and encouragement. After listening again to this sermon yesterday I was reminded all over again of just how much my own thinking on scripture, hermeneutics, and ministry I have happily stolen from Dr. Lowery through the years.


When I first accepted the call to teach at Ozark Christian College, Dr. Lowery shared with me a prayer of his for all of his students - especially those who teach. His prayer was from Psalm 119:99 - "I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes." I laughed when I heard it, and it still sounds outrageous to think about today. But really, shouldn't this be the prayer of every teacher and mentor? That his students may eventually be able to say, "I have gained more insight than my teachers - not because they were unfaithful or ignorant or irrelevant - but because they faithfully pointed me to the timeless truths of God's word. These truths which I have learned to consume and which I have learned to let consume me."

Dr. Lowery died last week after a prolonged battle with cancer. The man who knew more about the book of Revelation than anyone I've ever known, now knows immeasurably more than he ever imagined. Thank you, Dr. Lowery.

Surprising Predictions from the Bible!

Bible Name Code

Imagination and Hermeneutics

Hope is an imaginative enterprise. Especially is this the case when hope’s great gift is its power to negate the negatives of present experience. Only the capacity of the human imagination to transcend the given enables us to escape the constraints of the present and to suppose that things might be otherwise. This kind of imaginative or visionary hope is intimately related to transcendence. It takes us beyond the mere extrapolation of the future from the present and the calculation of the future on the basis of past and present. It envisages the genuinely new. Of course, this raises the specter of mere fantasy and the questions of the ground of hope and the sources of hopeful imagining. The more we envisage the category of the eschatologically new—a future reality that breaks the bounds of the immanent capacities of nature and history—the more important it is to distinguish imagination from fantasy. Christian hopeful imagining is grounded in the promise of God and resourced by the images of the scriptural revelation. As Moltmann’s theology of hope has always insisted, it is inspired and directed by the event of eschatological promise: the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. It is characterized also by its relevance to the way Christian life now is lived in the direction of the coming of God’s kingdom and its impact on present reality. In these ways, eschatological imagination is Christologically and scripturally disciplined imagination, not free-floating speculation.


Consequently, human imagination does not function in Christian eschatology as an alternative to God’s revelation. Rather, the revelatory promise of God in Christ and scripture appeals to the human imagination; seizes, transforms, and expands the imagination; makes the imagination the locus and vehicle of its reception. It is the imagination transfigured by God’s promise that is able to envisage in hope the promised transfiguration of reality. It is this Christian imagination that can envision the coming kingdom sufficiently for it to empower Christian living without reducing the kingdom to a reality that can be all too easily perfected already.

It is vital to insist that, when statements of eschatological expectation are said to be imaginative, this does not mean that they are not truth bearing, as an overly rationalistic view of human understanding might suggest. Christian hope is imaginative but not imaginary. In reckoning with the imaginative character of eschatological images and stories, we recognize that they refer to a reality that, because it lies beyond present experience, cannot be literally described. Christian eschatology must speak of a new creation that is both transcendently new and yet in continuity with this creation, since it is the renewal of this world. Of something that were wholly discontinuous with present reality we could hardly speak at all, but of the transcendent future of this world, we can speak in images that point beyond the limits of their literal reference.



Richard Bauckham, “Conclusion: Emerging Issues in Eschatology in the Twenty-First Century,” Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, 681-682.

Some thoughts on the documentary hypothesis

A short opinion piece reflecting on the documentary hypothesis and does it really matter.  It is also a reminder of how certain scholarly assumptions develop a sort of dogma about them over time - to reject these scholarly assumptions is to be labeled either a fool or a heretic.  I've always considered source criticism as little more than a red herring anyway.  It baffles me that scholars can exert so much energy either defending or demolishing arguments about authorship and sources (oftentimes without any historically verifyable evidence) and in the process totally miss or dismiss the message of the word which has been passed down to us.  This is what happens, I think, when you separate scripture from its moorings in the Church.  For instance, Hebrews has been used as authoritative scripture within the believing community for about 2000 years.  I love speculating about the authorship of Hebrews, but to a great extent it doesn't matter.  What does matter is what this book has had to say to the Church through the years and what it continues to say to the Church today. 

More End Times Predictions

The end is coming - on May 21st of this year!  Shoot!  And the Cubs season will only just be beginning.  This is a great demonstration of the ridiculous and laughable (and tragic) inconsistency of "Bible literalists."  They enjoy taking a passage from 2 Peter 3 out of its context and hyper-literally while ignoring clear statements made by Jesus himself about calculating dates and times.  This passage from 2 Peter 3 has been consistently misinterpreted.  This particular interpretation was extremely popular in the Middle Ages.  This band of merry travelers are by no means the first or the last group (unfortunately) to make a splash (and also a profit?) off of apocalyptic paranoia.  They really aren't even worth mentioning except that the biggest shame of it all is that Jesus' name is mocked and even dismissed in the midst of this craziness.  When asked, this group couldn't even articulate how to get to heaven.  How about...wait for it...Jesus?!  See the article here.

Translating the Son of God to Muslims

Faithful translation always requires contextualization.  If the intent of scripture is for God to reveal His purposes in Jesus Christ to all people, then our translations should be faithful to that purpose and strive to make scripture accessible to all people - while still remaining faithful to the original text.  This balance is often tricky especially when it comes to recognizing what might be more idiomatic language which is often very culture bound.  Is it ok to translate αδελφοι as "brothers and sisters?"  Contemporary translators seem to think so, and I tend to agree.  Is it ok to translate "kick against the goads" as "bang your head against the wall?"  Well, perhaps...if you're paraphrasing.  Is it ok to translate "Son of God" as "the Beloved Son who comes (or originates) from God?"  I must say that this makes me very uncomfortable, but this is the current debate revolving around the translation of the NT into Arabic.  Is the "Son of God" an idiomatic phrase which should be flexible in contemporary, contextualized translations or is there something about that specific title which communicates an important and essential truth about the nature of Jesus Christ? Ed Stetzer on his blog, shares a very thoughtful and critical response to this recent trend (most recently expressed and defended in an article in Christianity Today) of contextualizing the title "son of God."  The newer and less offensive translations have proven incredibly effective in reaching Muslims, but nevertheless the question remains: is there something about the title "Son of God" which is more than mere idiom and must be retained in our translations regardless of how it may cause others to stumble?  After all, a crucified prophet is a stumbling block to Muslims as well.  Mere pragmatics and the itching ears of culture cannot guide our translations.  This is a question which reaches far deeper than the contemporary gender-inclusive debate circling around many newer translations.  This contextualization question goes to the very heart of biblical christology.  I strongly recommend reading both articles.

Genders were an afterthought?

There is not much new in this article.  She mostly recycles old (and silly - David and Jonathan?  We're still making that argument?  Really?) arguments.  She does avoid semantic arguments with interpreting Paul.  Rather, she chooses to simply dismiss him.  There was one argument which was new - at least to me.  I have personally never heard the argument made that God originally created humans as androgenous and therefore chaste.  "God’s original plan was sexual unity in one body, not two.  The Genesis creation stories can support the notion that sexual intercourse is designed to reunite male and female into one body, but they can also suggest that God’s blessing was first placed on an undifferentiated body that didn’t have sex at all."  She bases this interpretation on the gnostic gospel of Philip and a third century Jewish rabbi.  Further, she believes that the resurrection ("spiritual") body which Paul envisions is also androgenous.  Turns out that genders are a result of the fall (not the type of interpretation that you come to expect from a feminist scholar).  Not only does this exegesis stretch the text beyond its breaking point.  To then base a justification of homosexuality on such an interpretation is clearly question begging.

Listening is a Virtue

We might call good listening a skill, but it is better described as a virtue, for it rests less on intellectual ability and more on an attitude of openness that is not just willing but eager to let the others have their say--in their language and from their perspective.  Otherwise they are reduced to the status of a self-justifying mirror in which we see ourselves as right because they are wrong and we are different from them.

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Loc. 2132-35 Kindle Ed.)

Interpretation as Performance

In exploring this mode of truth, we have seen Gadamer turn to the work in two overlapping modes, the classic text and the work of art.  In doing so he first distinguishes the performance arts, such as drama and music, from the nonperformance arts, such as literature; then he breaks down this distinction by suggesting that reading is a kind of performing.  The difference is that in the case of the (obviously) performing arts the primary interpreter, the actor who plays Hamlet or the pianist who plays the Hammerklavier Sonata, presents an interpretation to the audience, while in the case of the (apparently) nonperforming art the readers (note the plural) of a novel, short story, or poem present an interpretation of teh work to themselves. (1503-8)

All performance is interpretation and all interpretation is performance. (1514-15)

Gadamer repeatedly stresses that classic texts speak to us, address us, make claims on us about what is right and good and true.  In this respect they are more like persons with whom we engage in conversation than objects we subject to some methodical observation.  So we have one more model of interpretation. It is like 1) performing a play or sonata; 2) translating from one language into another; 3) applying the law to a particular, concrete situation; 4) applying a scriptural text to the life of believers; and now 5) carrying on a conversation.  The goal in every case is understanding. (1741-45)

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Kindle Ed.)

Multiple Perspectives

Should those of us interested in interpreting the Bible assimilate its texts to a series of equations? Doesn't the Bible point us in a different direction by telling us that we need four different interpretations of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as well as epistles interpreting the Christ event by a variety of authors?

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Loc. 768-70 Kindle Ed.)

Romantic Hermeneutics

1. Deregionalization - Schleiermacher set out to develop a general hermeneutics that would apply to culturally significant texts regardless of their subject matter.  He sought to identify the general features of interpretation that were common to rather than distinctive of the various disciplines.

2. The Hermeneutical Circle - The notion that the parts always have to be interpreted in terms of the whole--and vice versa.

3. Psychologism - It begins with the assumption that language is primarily to be understood as the outer expression of the inner psychic life.  This hermeneutics is often labeled "romantic" because it shares this expressivism with the wider cultural traditions call romanticism.  The goal of interpretation, then, is to reverse the process of writing, to work back from the outer expression to the inner experience, to reconstruct, re-create, refeel, reexperience, relive that inner experience.

4. Objectivism - Dilthey is especially insistent that interpretation be "scientific" so that its findings may be "objective" and rise to the level of "universal validity."  The prestige and power of the natural sciences seem to suggest that rational respectability requires that the disciplines that relate to distinctly human meaning (Geisteswissenschaften, humanities, human sciences) must aspire to a comparable objectivity, especially against the possibility of some sort of historical relativism.

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Kindle Ed.)

Chastened Epistemology

We need not think that hermeneutical despair ("anything goes") and hermeneutical arrogance (we have "the" interpretation) are the only alternatives.  We can acknowledge that we see and interpret "in a glass, darkly" or "in a mirror, dimly" and that we know "only in part" (1 Cor. 13:12), while ever seeking to understand and interpret better by combining the tools of scholarship with the virtues of humbly listening to the interpretations of others and above all to the Holy Spirit.

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Loc. 174-178 Kindle Ed.)

Metaphors are the Spice of Life

Literalists, maybe especially religious literalists, have a difficult time with metaphors. A metaphor is a word that makes an organic connection from what you can see to what you can't see. In any conversation involving God, whom we can't see, metaphors are invaluable for keeping language vivid and immediate. Without metaphors we are left with colorless abstractions and vague generalities.

Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection, Loc. 55-58 (Kindle Edition)

Symbolism and Revelation

Revelation is more like a map: and a map, once we learn the symbols it uses, is actually of more use to us than an aerial photograph would be.

N.T. Wright, Small Faith--Great God, Loc. 60-61 (Kindle Edition)

Augustine and figurative meaning

Any harsh and even cruel word or deed attributed to God or his saints that is found in the holy scriptures applies to the destruction of the realm of lust [i.e. it is to be taken only figuratively].

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3.39

John Piper on Non-Instrumental Worship