Having completed my main review of the New Testament (and some Old Testament) texts, cataloguing almost 500 passages, I am "celebrating" that milestone by publishing a part of the paper that helps me in the processing and weighing of these texts, which is currently entitled Chapter 2: Key Notions Defined. It is also is an opportunity for me to tidy up these definitions. Here is the next one:
Interpretation
This is absolutely central to the thesis of this paper! I
mentioned it a little already in the opening chapter, where I recalled that we
are all interpreters of the information our senses provide our brains. We have
trained our brains to process information from the world in order to interact
with it better, to survive and to thrive. Sometimes we process well, and
sometimes less well, to a point where we can say to someone who understood
something quite different from what we intended to say as having
“misinterpreted” what we said. I recently discovered kicking about in the back
of my mind something of a working definition of poor biblical interpretation
that I hope you like and find useful when it comes to how many approach the
Bible on a variety of topics:
Interpretation is
what makes me say this verse’s plain
reading works just fine for me, but that verse needs to be understood
according to its context or underlying doctrinal truth. Most Bible teachers
or theologians probably practice this to some degree, it is difficult to
completely avoid. One person stands out for me, however. His name is Phil
Norris. Whilst I was studying at King’s Bible College and Training Centre,
Oxford, in the Autumn of 2001, he taught our opening module, on exegesis. I
still remember Phil saying something very fresh, and it remains fresh: we do
not need to learn the context of just the passages we find difficult, but of
the verses we cherish or find easy to interpret too. That sounds so simple! But
it needed stating as it is not a very natural approach for most of us. We should
note Fee & Stuart: “The antidote to bad
interpretation is not no interpretation,
but good interpretation, based on
common-sense guidelines”.
Interpretation is absolutely fine, necessary and normal,
provided we do not, as Stephen Holmes put it in an interview in 2014, “smuggle
our assumptions onto the table”. See Exegesis& Eisegesis.
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