Biblical Interpretation II

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how folks from different backgrounds, social locations, and etc. will view any given piece of art—literature, film, painting—in different ways. We all bring our own “stuff” to any situation, and that includes how we understand the Bible. Historically, there have been several approaches to dealing with this fundamental problem of interpretation, and this week, as promised, we look at three of them.

The first approach is that the Bible means what the church says it means. This has the longest history—for thirteen hundred years, the Roman Catholic Church, or one of its Eastern offspring, was the only game in town, and if you were Christian, you accepted what the church said about what was written in Scripture. Today, of course, Catholics can pick up a number of translations for personal study, although until the mid 1960s that was still frowned upon by the Roman Catholic Church. Lest we think that it doesn’t happen in Protestant circles, recall that denominations subscribe to differing interpretations of scripture even today; hopefully these differences are based on scholarly rather than personal opinion.

A second approach is Biblical inerrancy. In this view, the bible means what it says, in the “plain sense” of things; Scripture is completely accurate, including the historical and scientific parts. According to this view, the world was created four-thousand-and-some-odd years ago, wives should obey their husbands, and women should “learn in silence with full submission” (1 Timothy 2:11). Of course, there are various flavors of inerrancy, depending upon how much one really wants to follow the Hebrew purity laws [which say that you shall not “put on a garment made of two different materials” (Leviticus 19:19)]. I suspect that there very few true inerrantists around, because nobody holds every jot and tittle to be applicable to our lives any more.

Proponents of inerrancy say that it’s a slippery slope, that once you accept that one thing might not be correct, it opens the door for everything else, and they are exactly right. Once you admit that maybe it really wasn’t God’s intention that homosexuals be executed (Leviticus 20:13) or that God really doesn’t approve of bashing Edomite babies’ heads against the rocks (Psalm 137), it opens everything up for question. And without a clear set of guidelines for deciding what parts are human projections and what parts are God’s, you get interpretation by personal opinion or, just as bad, by tradition (I was taught that as a child, so I really don’t want to hear anything different).

Fortunately, there is a way to approach the problem that provides a scholarly framework for figuring out what in the Bible is of God and what is of human beings. In the mid-1800s, so-called “historical-critical” methods of interpretation were developed that attempt to provide historical context for scriptures, so that the contextual biases of Scripture’s authors—and those of its original auditors—can be taken into account. Then, in the mid-1900s, a school of interpretation called “literary criticism” arose that sought to better zero-in on what the author was trying to convey in his (rarely her) writings. Together, these two interpretive methods form the backbone of modern Scriptural interpretation; in a week or so we’ll take a look at them and suggest ways all everyone can partake of them to be better, more intentional readers of Scripture.