How Do We Get the Bible Right?
Mistakes are costly! Sometimes the costs are mild—an extra trip to the store or a follow-up text to correct a phone’s autocorrect feature. Sometimes the costs are high, including damage or death as our highways graphically illustrate.
I hate making mistakes. I hate being mistaken. But somewhere between being paralyzed by a fear of making mistakes and being careless about costly errors, there is a fruitful approach. This is true of life in general, but also of biblical interpretation.
In biblical interpretation, we strive to find a fruitful approach between fear of getting things wrong and careless interpretation. Truth is, we fail to hear God’s Word whether we fail to read it, or fail to understand what we have read. Being willing to learn from our mistakes is an important way to limit the damage that our misreading of God’s Word can create.
To misrepresent the meaning of God’s Word is a costly mistake. History provides many sobering examples of how misinterpretation of Scripture has harmed the work of God, bringing devastation to faith and witness. When we don’t listen to or read God’s Word with sufficient humility to hear his message rather than the one we think he ought to have said, we don’t honor the Speaker! This is a mistake.
Here are two mistakes to avoid. The first is a general approach issue, and the second is a notorious historical circumstance often brought up against the church.
First, some Christians claim that interpreting the Bible shouldn’t even be attempted. They say one must choose between “taking it literally” and “interpreting it.” But to say we are taking it literally means an interpretive choice has already been made. This approach seeks to bind the reader to a single way of approaching God’s Word without acknowledging that it comes to us through historical accounts, poetry, prophecy, parable, proverb, and psalm. Not seeing this variety in the ways that God communicates to us is a mistake bound to make us misread God’s Word.
Being willing to learn from our mistakes is an important way to limit the damage that our misreading of God’s Word can create.
Figurative expressions are a ubiquitous element of human speech. The ability to decode the figurative aspects of spoken or written speech is basic to communicative competence. Remember Amelia Bedelia, the character in the kids’ story who took everything absolutely literally? When she heard, “Daddy is tied up in the office,” she imagined a rope!
If we want to hear God’s message, we need to understand that the plain meaning of a passage or an expression is not always the most literalistic interpretation possible. It might not even be what we think it is at first glance.
Second, in the 17th and 18th centuries, observations through a telescope generated mounting evidence that the earth revolved around the sun (heliocentrism) rather than that the sun revolved around the earth (geocentrism).
The Catholic Church declared Galileo a heretic for affirming heliocentrism, and some of the Protestant Reformers also objected that the theory was contrary to scripture. This response of the church to new research about the universe has been used by many since to push the idea that one cannot be at the same time a reliable scientist and a believer in Scripture.
Passages such as Psalm 104:5 sound geocentric. God “set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved” (ESV). Ecclesiastes 1:5 speaks of the sun’s cyclicality, “The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.”
Even some of the churchmen/astronomers who judged Galileo agreed that heliocentrism was a better explanation than geocentrism for what they were seeing in the sky. But because they felt restricted by their reading of Scripture, they could not agree that the earth actually moved around the sun.
What can we learn from this history? Today most Christians feel no crisis of faith when they acknowledge that it both appears and is true that the earth moves around the sun. The consensus is that those verses in Psalms and Ecclesiastes had been misread by the church. Are there issues today where we feel compelled to deny what appears to be true because we have been misreading the Bible?
The stakes are high, and we remain mistake-prone. Yet God chose to reveal his Word in human languages. It’s a task God’s people have been working at for centuries, variously succeeding and failing.
I hope this “Mistakes Were Made” series introduced here helps us learn from our mistakes and grow in sincerity and humility.
2 Responses
It seems a willingness to say “I really don’t know,” regarding some questions of exactly what God is saying, is a necessary form of expressed humility.
Humility is so important.