Scriptural Interpretation Quotes

“Stories tell us that life is meaningful, and at their best they show us how to go about finding that meaning for ourselves.”
― Daniel Schwabauer, The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling

“As used by Paul in the first century, arsenokoitai likely means pederasty. Pederastic relationships, inherently abusive and exploitative, are not equivalent to committed, loving, and monogamous same-sex relationships today. To say that they are would be like saying sex trafficking of young girls is equivalent to marriage.”
― Kathy Baldock, Walking the Bridgeless Canyon: Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBT Community

“It can be unhelpful to wax eloquent about the inerrancy of Scripture without an accompanying acknowledgment that, while Scripture may be inerrant, there are no inerrant interpreters of Scripture.”
― Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter, Generous Spaciousness: Responding to Gay Christians in the Church

“If I say to some kids roughhousing in church, "Don't kill anyone," they know what concern I am addressing. They know I'm exaggerating for emphasis and not speaking in general terms—that I'm not, for example, commenting on the morality of military service. Stripped of the rich context we share, the mere words, "Don't kill anyone" could easily be understood to mean don't kill anyone, anytime, ever.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“The rejection of all homosexual acts is rooted in a desire to uphold what is understood to be the meaning of the prohibitive Scriptures and the tradition of heterosexual marriage. It is an attempt to be careful to walk in faithfulness to God. The rejection of exclusionary practices aimed at gay and lesbian people is rooted in a desire to uphold Scripture by seeking to carefully understand its meaning in the original historical context and to apply Scripture's teaching carefully. It is an attempt to uphold Scripture's caution against religious zeal that unintentionally accepts harm of the neighbor or fails to love the neighbor well. Both positions are principled positions seeking to uphold important goods.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“Virtually every church tradition, by theology, interpretive strategies, or pastoral practice, makes accommodations for divorced people who seek to remarry. These accommodations permit divorced people to enter unions that are outside the rule laid down in the Bible. But we can't have it both ways. We can't apply a strict "biblical marriage" rule to gay people and not apply it to those who are divorced and remarried.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“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