Biblical Interpretation Quotes

“The Qur’an does not hesitate to retell biblical incidents with modifications—or to introduce entirely new vignettes around iconic biblical figures. As a book purposely not constructed around a formal narrative, the Qur’an leverages these allusions primarily to emphasize a moral value rather than re- veal an origin story. Every time the Qur’an presents a story, it always follows with terse analyses synthesizing key takeaways.”
― Mohamad Jebara, The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy

“Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.”
― Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

“Good docents often begin by asking the viewer, “What do you see in this work?” The idea that the expert should be allowed to constrain the interpretation of others rightly offends our sensibilities about museums and art. It ought to offend us just as much when applied to Scripture.”
― Dale B. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation

“Those who devote themselves to the study of Sacred Scripture should always remember that the various hermeneutical approaches have their own philosophical underpinnings, which need to be carefully evaluated before they are applied to the sacred texts.”
― John Paul II, Fides et Ratio: On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason

“Many erroneously suppose that when Christ's Millennial Kingdom is inaugurated every one will be pleased with its ruling. But not so. Its regulations will be far more exacting than those of any previous government, and the liberties of the people will be restricted to a degree that will be galling indeed to many now clamoring for an increase of liberty. Liberty to deceive, to misrepresent, to overreach and to defraud others, will be entirely cut off. Liberty to abuse themselves or others in food or in drink, or in any way to corrupt good manners, will be totally denied to all. Liberty or license to do wrong of any sort will not be granted to any. The only liberty that will be granted to any will be the true and glorious liberty of the sons of God -liberty to do good to themselves and others in any and in every way; but nothing will be allowed to injure or destroy in all that Holy Kingdom (Isa. 11:9; Rom. 8:21). That rule will consequently be felt by many to be a severe one, breaking up all their former habits and customs, as well as breaking up institutions founded upon these false habits and false ideas of liberty. Because of its firmness and vigor, it is symbolically called an iron rule -'He shall rule them with a rod of iron' (Compare Rev. 2:26, 27; Psa, 2:8-12 and 49:14).”
― Charles Taze Russell, Studies In The Scriptures, Volume 1

“The afflicted pray for healing--just as hungry people pray for bread, but when has God ever sent bread? In my recollection of the scriptures, God has always sent a woman. A woman like Eve and the unnamed woman that preceded her. A woman like Moses's mother, Jochebed, and the woman who raised him to be a king, Bithia. A woman like Deborah and her skull-piercing homegirl, Jael. Maybe some manna, but when has God ever sent bread?”
― DaMaris B. Hill, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland

“It is well known that Pentecost reverses Babel. The people who built the tower of Babel sought to make a name, and a unity, for themselves. At Pentecost, God builds his temple, uniting people in Christ. Unity – interpretive agreement and mutual understanding – is, it would appear, something that only God can accomplish. And accomplish it he does, but not in the way we might have expected. Although onlookers thought that the believers who received the Spirit at Pentecost were babbling (Acts 2:13), in fact they were speaking intelligibly in several languages (Acts 2:8-11). Note well: they were all saying the same thing (testifying about Jesus) in different languages. It takes a thousand tongues to say and sing our great Redeemer’s praise.

Protestant evangelicalism evidences a Pentecostal plurality: the various Protestant streams testify to Jesus in their own vocabularies, and it takes many languages (i.e. interpretive traditions) to minister the meaning of God’s Word and the fullness of Christ. As the body is made up of many members, so many interpretations may be needed to do justice to the body of the biblical text. Why else are there four Gospels, but that the one story of Jesus was too rich to be told from one perspective only? Could it be that the various Protestant traditions function similarly as witnesses who testify to the same Jesus from different situations and perspectives?”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity

“An abundance of pictorial fancy, after all, furnished the simple mind quite as much matter for deviating from pure doctrine as any personal interpretation of Holy Scripture.”
― Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages

“The irrational bias of the myth of progress can be seen in the tendency to criticize orthodox church fathers for reading Greek metaphysics into the text, while overlooking Baruch Spinoza's rationalism and Bruno Bauer's Hegelianism on their own biblical interpretation. Is this because "Greek" metaphysics is bad, but "German" metaphysics is good? According to the history of hermeneutics as told from an Enlightenment perspective, if it were not for the pagan Enlightenment, Christians would still be reading Greek metaphysics into the Bible like Augustine and making it say whatever they pleased like Origen. Is it not rather bizarre that this narrative asks us to believe that it took the pagan Epicureanism of the Enlightenment to rescue us from the "subjectivism" of the Nicene fathers, medieval schoolmen, and Protestant Reformers?”
― Craig A. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis

“In the wake of the Reformation, as the correct reading of scripture became a matter of increasingly high stakes, Hebrew, as well as Aramaic, Samaritan, Ethiopian, Armenian, and other languages that preserved versions of scripture and documents of the early church, became essential weapons of theological warfare.”
― Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity

“I urge not that we assume that love will provide a reliable foundation for knowledge but that we nonetheless keep the requirements of love of neighbor foremost in our interpretations of Scripture. We should consider, for example, love to be a necessary criterion (a minimum) when defending an interpretation of Scripture even if it cannot be a sufficient criterion that will guarantee ethical interpretation.”
― Dale B. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation

“Eternal torture is nowhere suggested in the Old Testament Scriptures, and only a few statements in the New Testament can be so misconstrued as to appear to teach it; and these are found either among the symbolisms of Revelation, or among the parables and dark sayings of our Lord, which were not understood by the people who heard them (Luke 8:10) and which seem to be but little better comprehended today. [...]”
― Charles Taze Russell, Studies In The Scriptures, Volume 1

“The iron empire, Rome, was by far the strongest, and endured longer than its predecessors. In fact, the Roman Empire still continues, as represented in the nations of Europe. This division is represented in the ten toes of the image. The clay element blended with the iron in the feet represents the mixture of church and state. This mixture is in the Scriptures termed 'Babylon' -confusion. As we shall presently see, stone is the symbol of the true Kingdom of God, and Babylon substituted an imitation of stone -clay- which it has united with the fragmentary remains of the [iron] Roman empire. And this mixed system -church and state- the Church Nominal wedded to the kingdoms of this world, which the Lord calls Babylon, confusion, presumes to call itself Christendom -Christ's Kingdom.”
― Charles Taze Russell, Studies In The Scriptures, Volume 1

“Great storytellers show us how the tiniest of sins can have devastating effects on others.”
― Daniel Schwabauer, The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“A well-told story bypasses our intellectual firewalls and changes us through our emotions.”
― Daniel Schwabauer, The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“There are good theological reasons to reject making authorial intention the goal of the interpretation of Scripture. First, we must recognize that what has traditionally been considered authoritative for the church is Scripture, not the intentions, real or imagined, of the original authors. Yes, Christian interpreters throughout history have talked about what Paul or some other biblical writer may have meant to say, but that has traditionally not been taken to limit the meaning of the text to that intention. Thus, even if the psalmist intended to speak of David or some other king of ancient Israel, the church has always considered it legitimate to interpret the psalm as referring also—or even only or supremely—to Christ. Even if the human authors did not intend to affirm the Trinity in the first century, the church may legitimately interpret Scripture in Trinitarian terms. The church has traditionally not located the site of inspiration to be in the mind of the human author but in the text of Scripture itself. The shift to concentrating on the intentions of the human author is something that only happened in the modern era, with the rise of historical criticism.”
― Dale B. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation

“Any who sin willfully, against full light and ability, will perish in the second death. And should any one, during that age of trial, under its full blaze of light, spurn the offered favors, and make no progress toward perfection for a hundred years, he will be reckoned unworthy of life and will be 'cut off' though at a hundred years he would be in the period of comparative childhood. Thus it is written of that day: 'As a lad shall one die a hundred years old; and as a sinner shall be accursed he who dieth at a hundred years old' (Isa. 65:20) Thus all must have at least one hundred years of trial; and if not so obstinate as to refuse to make progress, their trial will continue throughout the entire day of Christ, reaching a culmination only at its close.”
― Charles Taze Russell, Studies In The Scriptures, Volume 1

“For instance, in the matter of the inspiration of Scripture, he fixed first on the obvious fact, which was forgotten by four furious centuries of sectarian battle, that the meaning of Scripture is very far from self-evident; and that we must often interpret it in the light of other truths. If a literal interpretation is really and flatly contradicted by an obvious fact, why then we can only say that the literal interpretation must be a false interpretation. But the fact must really be an obvious fact. And unfortunately, nineteenth-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were seventeenth-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation.

Thus, private theories about what the Bible ought to mean, have met in loud and widely advertised controversy, especially in the Victorian time; and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion. (chapter 3)”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“What is government? What is the
relationship between theology and politics? How should Christians think about their political participation? These questions
typically get lost in our conversations. We jump into the juicy fight of the moment, whip out our favorite Bible verses, and completely forget to ask if we even agree on the nature of human government or the relationship between the church and earthly governments.”
― Kaitlyn Schiess, The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here

“The Bible is not a free-floating book of ageless wisdom, an interesting historical document, or a weapon that can be put in the service of any political goal. The Bible is a gift from God to the church, given for a particular purpose: to shape that community into the kind of people who can fulfill their commission to make disciples of all nations and steward God’s good creation, anticipating its final redemption.”
― Kaitlyn Schiess, The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here

“He gave me a new German translation of the Bible and opened it to the first page. There I read again and again:
'Und die Erde war Wirrnis und Wüste. Finsternis allüber Abgrund. Braus Gottes brütend allüber den Wassern.'
It could have been written about me, I thought. I thought that the beginning had been like this and I kept on hearing these words sound in my heart.”
― Lili Elbe, Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change

“The parable isn’t the message; it’s the mechanism. It’s not the lamp; it’s the stand.”
― Daniel Schwabauer, The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“...story is telling us that we’re aware of something outside ourselves to which we are all accountable and to which our own behavior is not measuring up.”
― Daniel Schwabauer, The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“Most of our moral problems are rooted in our human, perhaps innate, desire to place the moral compass of the universe within ourselves.”
― Daniel Schwabauer, The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“Story never builds anything substantial without a tape measure.”
― Daniel Schwabauer, God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“The prerequisite for receiving from him is believing in him. There is no other path to acquiring “the words of eternal life,” as Peter called them (John 6:68–69).”
― Daniel Schwabauer, God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“Jesus is the voice, the personality, of God in human form.”
― Daniel Schwabauer, The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“I am the blind man who was given his sight. So are you—unless you are still blind.”
― Daniel Schwabauer, The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“The story of Jesus is the one true story that gives meaning to all the others. Which is why the language of that story is not just the language of humanity; it is the language of life.”
― Daniel Schwabauer