The Bible and Understanding Scripture
The Bible is God’s word to His people. Christians are taught to read and study the Bible daily. A new person in the body of Christ would understand reading and studying just as one reads a regular book or study material. Often Christians are not taught how to read and study, instead they internalize reading and studying as memorization of the Bible because most Christians can remember the word of God without a complete understanding of scripture. When Christians are taught the history of the Bible and how the Bible should be interpreted, they will be able to understand the message God is relaying to them. Understanding the Bible was written as an entire literary book will unfold all the messages throughout the Bible. A reader of the Bible can pertinently understand the words of scripture; once the foundation of interpretation and forms of the different types of literature are understood with a solid form of biblical translation available.
Correct interpretation of the Bible is of extreme importance to understand the Bible.
When a person reads the Bible they begin to internally interpret the Bible. Interpreting the Bible independently is not an issue, but allowing who we are as the reader to overshadow the word of God can be an issue. It is the same as listening to a story without pictures and imagining the images in our heads. The images in our heads may be completely different from reality. Sometimes Christians gain incorrect interpretation from pastoral leaders who defer the true meaning of the Bible to support non- biblical truths they teach. Christians must ask God for wisdom to understand the literary work of the Bible and discernment in order to accept good interpretation or to shy ...
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...are gifted with must start with a solid foundation. If people continue to teach Scripture foolishly, people who are interested in becoming a Christian may not be convinced to respect a doctrine of inconsistency. The inconsistency has nothing to do with God’s word, but the lack of labor and effort in understanding Scripture. Reading the epistles can be difficult due to several reasons. I believe the biggest issue is cultural relativity. Often traditions, culture, and human beliefs interfere with Scripture and cause confusion among everyone involved. The epistles were not written for people in today’s world. The writer and the reader could communicate with one another because they were in the same era. When reading the Bible the reader should be concerned with what it for certain; meaning understanding what the Scripture is saying and not reading between the lines.
It is the reader and his or her interpretive community who attempts to impose a unified reading on a given text. Such readers may, and probably will, claim that the unity they find is in the text, but this claim is only a mask for the creative process actually going on. Even the most carefully designed text can not be unified; only the reader's attempted taming of it. Therefore, an attempt to use seams and shifts in the biblical text to discover its textual precursors is based on a fundamentally faulty assumption that one might recover a stage of the text that lacked such fractures (Carr 23-4).
For thousands of years there have been many transcriptions and changes to the words of God, For example, just in the last thousand years there has been three different transcriptions, The New Testament, Homer, and also Sophocles. For a person not to look for their own interpretation of the lord’s book is
N.T Wright (2008) stated that “When we read the scriptures as Christians, we read it precisely as people of the new covenant and of the new creation” (p.281). In this statement, the author reveals a paradigm of scriptural interpretation that exists for him as a Christian, theologian, and profession and Bishop. When one surveys the entirety of modern Christendom, one finds a variety of methods and perspectives on biblical interpretation, and indeed on the how one defines the meaning in the parables of Jesus. Capon (2002) and Snodgrass (2008) offer differing perspectives on how one should approach the scriptures and how the true sense of meaning should be extracted. This paper will serve as a brief examination of the methodologies presented by these two authors. Let us begin, with an
This quote by Gene Nowlin in his book The Paraphrased Perversion of the Bible summarizes the composition of the Bible. Throughout life, Christians grasp tightly to these words of God in hopes to inherit the Kingdom of God one day. In order to do this, they must study the Bible closely and apply it to their lives daily. Without the proper Bible, this may become a difficult task to accomplish. Although the various translations of the Christian Bible are exceptionally similar in their message, some have quite a few differences and perversions that set them apart from one another. Many of them even leave out several potentially important verses in their revision. These variations contribute to the justification of one translation being more reliable and accurate than the other versions.
The most striking of these is the notion that the Bible needs correction. This is huge in that it suggests that God failed somehow in inspiring the original scribes to write what He wanted in the manner the He wanted it written. Contemporizing the language is therefore seen as justified, and in the process interpretation and exposition are included. Some modern translations remove the reader as far from the original as the old Latin did. The Bible does not need to be changed to make it relevant; because it is the ETERNAL Word of God it will always be relevant. Metaphors, gender, patriarchalism, short sentences, repetition – God designed it all that way.
Even though humans wrote the text, translating it and passing it down from generations to generations, God’s truth is unchanging. Debates of the inerrancy of the bible cannot usurp God as the King of grace. Instead of focusing on the inerrancy of the Bible, individuals who wish to seek a life of faith should focus on the inspiration God is showing them in his word. These revelations should move them into applicable, daily life changing implications from what they have learned. God shows revelations of himself through the Bible, and his character is revealed time and time again throughout scripture. Any faulty facts or discrepancies in grammar or data, should not take away from the value that scripture holds. When we read scripture we bring new meaning of interpretations of the truths God shows us, since new eras and environmental factors will be influential on how we process information. The bible is not just a fact book, telling humans stories of the past, but instead the bible is inspired instructions for how we can deal with spiritual and ethical encounters we
...times we want to change scripture to fit our lifestyle and that is wrong. We need to take scripture as God intended it to be taken and let it be the head of our lives.
In my Christian tradition, the interpretation of scripture is approached literally, historically and spiritually. My Pastor usually gives background history of the scripture before explaining the context. Similar to most of the ministers in my church he will mention that he received inspiration from God while studying a particular text. As a result, I believe God is the true interpreter of Scripture. Specifically no two individuals get the same meaning from the same scripture. I believe that Scriptural interpretation is inspired by God. Therefore, each person’s approach to interpretation is tailored by God to the individual’s needs. As I consider the early Christian and Medieval methods of interpretation, many of methods are in use today. I believe different methods of interpretation are necessary to accommodate individual approaches to God.
The Old Testament and the Bible itself has been studied extensively for centuries. Archeologists and Scholars have labored and pondered over texts trying to decipher its clues. It does not matter how many times the Old Testament has been studied there will always be something new to learn about it or the history surrounding it. In the book Reading the Old Testament: an Introduction, the author Lawrence Boadt presents us with a few different authors of the Old Testament that used different names for God and had a unique insight into the texts. These four sources are titled P for priests, E for Elohim, J for Jehovah, and Y for Yahweh (95). These four unique sources help us realize that there is more than one author of the Pentateuch. These authors took the text and adapted for their culture. This independent source is used by scholars to help gain insight into what was behind the texts of the bible so we are not left with an incomplete picture of what went into the creation of the bible. Julius Wellhausen used these four sources to publish a book to able us to better understand the sources and to give it credibility with the Protestant scholars at the time (Boadt 94). These sources that is independent of the bible as in the DVD Who Wrote the Bible? and the Nova website aide in shedding light on the history that surrounded the writers who wrote the text and what inspired them to write it in the first place. The DVD shows the discovery of The Dead Sea Scrolls and the extensive history of the texts and all its sources in an effort to try to find exactly who wrote the bible (Who Wrote). These scrolls have aided scholars immensely by giving us some of the oldest known manuscripts of the bible in the world today. It shows that the bible w...
The Bible is read and interpreted by many people all over the world. Regardless, no one knows the absolute truth behind scripture. Walter Brueggemann, professor of Old Testament, wrote “Biblical Authority” to help people understand what he describes as six different parts that make up the foundation to ones understanding of scripture. He defines these six features as being: inherency, interpretation, imagination, ideology, inspiration, and importance. As Brueggemann explains each individual part, it is easy to see that they are all interconnected because no one can practice one facet without involuntarily practicing at least one other part.
We have no Biblical record of Jesus speaking against the issue of slavery. Thus, Christians on all sides of the debate used the Bible’s ambiguity on the subject to argue their own side concerning whether slavery constitutes as sin.
The Bible is the Word of God. It is God’s message for all of humanity. The Bible is divine revelation, breathed by God, written by men, and is applicable for all of humanity. In today’s world, there is controversy over if the inerrancy of the Bible and inspiration of the writers; however, there is little controversy over the simple fact of the New Testament, as a whole, itself. The Bible is not one long book, but rather, the Bible is a book consisting of various letters and manuscripts from throughout the history of mankind. A human being wrote every book of today’s Bible during various times in history. However, there is a classic divide in the books—Old and New Testament. The Old Testament is considered the Jewish Bible. This Bible was the original Scriptures during the time of Jesus and was the original Scriptures for many years. Therefore, not much controversy has risen over the assembly of the Old Testament.
... for personal reasons you to are using exegetical approaches to the scriptures. We do this every time we read something or hear it spoken. The Bible is no different besides that you have to decipher it correctly. By reading other commentaries on that book or verse you can form your own exegetical hypothesis, but make sure it is a biblical one.
With the advent of the printing press and the protestant reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Word of God became available to the common believer. Now, in the twenty first century, people all over the world, can read for themselves the scriptures in their own languages. Consider the Bible studies going on in any given country on any given evening, where people are encouraged to interact with the sacred scriptures. As encouraging as this may be, it may present a problem. Could discussions of what a scripture ‘means to me’ cloud out what the scripture originally meant? Is it even possible to know the author’s intent? Even if we could understand a first century text as its author intended, can we also grasp what it’s supposed to mean to us?
A response to the interpretation of Acts 4:32–36 as an endorsement of a type of communal living as being normative for the Christian church.