How to Read and Why: A Thought on Biblical Interpretation

As a literature major, I understand that the way which we read has profound implications for the way in which we live. I’ve been reading as long as I can remember, from pouring through books about Cinderella when I was three, to reading Tolkien at fifteen, and on to reading Kierkegaard at twenty. There can be nothing more enjoyable than internalizing a fiction fantasy or philosophy for the first time. However, the process of reading involves more than examining letters on a page and consuming them as appear. All reading relies on varying levels of interpretation, the process through which we create meaning in what we read. No one comes to a text without their own particular context, background, aesthetic preferences, or educational training. All these factors come into play when reading even the shortest texts.

Let’s think about a brief example, which, though simplistic, reveals the difference between interpretation and reading. Consider the red octagon-shaped sign with white trim and letters that read “STOP.” We like to call this a stop sign. Though the text is relatively short, we all know how to react to the sign. When we are driving, we cease movement a reasonable distance in front of the sign, and then we wait for a few seconds, and then proceed again. We understand what the sign is saying because we have been taught to read it in a certain way by our parents, law enforcement officials, and societal conventions. The text itself, four simple letters, doesn’t actually tell us all the information that we need to fully understand the actions we need to take at the sign. The text of the sign tells us to stop, but questions arise. Stop? Stop where? Stop for how long?

I’ll admit that this example is a bit far-fetched. Yet, to me it illustrates a basic principle of interpretation vs. reading. Mere reading implies that every text read by every reader will elicit the same responses every time, without fail. Interpretation implies that the process of coming to a standard normative reading takes work and searching for all individuals and communities. Interpretation also implies that we can’t understand a text fully on our own. We have to outside the text itself for parts of its meaning.

In Acts chapter 8, the apostle Philip meets an Ethiopian eunuch reading the Hebrew Scriptures by the side of the road after worshiping in Jerusalem. While the man was moved by the texts that were read in service, he did not know how to make meaning out of them. When Philip approached him, asking “Do you understand what you are reading?”, the eunuch replied, “How can I, unless someone explains it to me?” The eunuch has reasonable questions about the meaning of the text, and knows that reading the text alone, while it probably produces good feeling in him, is not enough for creating meaning. He must ask questions of another, and extrapolating from the story a bit, ask questions of the text itself in order to discover the meaning of it. The reason why sermon giving is so important in churches, and why humans publish outside material on divine text is that, sort of like our stop sign, the meaning of sacred texts is illuminated by the interpretations that others present to us.

While I believe that learning to shrewdly interpret rather than merely read is crucial even for human fictions and philosophies, I believe that learning to interpret could have no better end than learning how to interpret the Bible. Even if one does not accept the claims of the Bible as true, one should learn that the claims made by the entirety of the Bible are quite serious. Men claiming to interact with God is not to be taken lightly. At the least, the Western culture in which we live has been profoundly altered by the claims of the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian New Testament. For that reason, if none other, one should learn to grapple with the serious issues of Biblical text.

In the Hebrew Bible class that I am currently taking at Wesley seminary, one of our textbooks, A Theological Interpretation of the Old Testament, talks about the Old Testament in terms of interpretive claims inherent in the text: “Claims are made by and for these ancient texts that make them more than the literature, history, and sociology of an ancient people called Israel. These texts are written, collected, and passed on through generations as the witness of a community of faith shaped in relation to the character and actions of the God of Israel” (Birch, et al. 1). We are caught in a tension. The Bible is a book that makes serious claims about a divine God, and yet it’s production and assembly -- from the writing and compiling of oral traditions, to the editorial work of rabbis, church fathers, and scribes, to the discovery and translation of various texts which show certain degrees of variance-- is quite human.*

According to Birch, et. al, in the twentieth century, under the rise of modernism, the historical-critical method of Biblical interpretation and its variants (source criticism, form criticism, tradio-historical criticism, and redaction criticism) assumed that the one concrete meaning to the Biblical text could be established through the study of history, textual convention, and tradition. As modern assumptions about the world and man’s ability to improve it through enlightened thought have been contradicted by the chaos and disappointment of human experience in an increasingly turbulent world, new questions have been asked of traditional texts. Scholars, pastors, and serious readers of the Biblical text now consider issues of gender, class, ethnicity, and political difference when reading the Bible. Through asking questions in a different manner, the Bible comes alive again for a new generation.

This week at Davenport we’ll continue the conversation that I’ve been having with myself for some time. Here are some questions to think about and comment about here in preparation. As always, please feel free to participate in our discussion here even if you can’t come to our discussions.

1. Some suggest that only certain methods of interpretation are valid for Biblical scholarship because uncovering what might seem like potential contradictions in the text destabilizes the meaning and purpose of Christianity. In light of this thought, do you believe that there are certain ways which the Bible should not be read? Are there interpretations so dangerous that they should not even be entertained before they are rejected?

2. What should be understood by what some see as contradictions in the Bible? Can the Bible be contradictory if it is divinely inspired?


*Many, myself included, believe in an element of divine guidance and inspiration even in the human processes of compilation, editing, and translation.