Why People Interpret the Bible Differently and Why It Matters

Have you ever wondered why there are so many different opinions about different biblical passages, ethical issues, and other matters addressed in the Bible?

It's a good question.

After all, why (or even better, how) could people reading the same Bible and the same scriptural passage come to such diametrically opposed positions on different issues?

Some, for example, read Genesis 19 as God metes out punishment on Sodom and Gomorrah, and conclude that God punished those cities after multiple warnings and rebellion over unrepentant sin, particularly sexual/homosexual sin, while others (such as those sympathetic to homosexuality) will say that God punished the people of Sodom and Gomorrah for a lack of hospitality to its divine guests/angelic visitors.

Other examples abound. There are people who profess to be Christians who believe in "just war" and others who believe the Bible teaches pacifism. Some believe in capital punishment while others believe in rehabilitation of prisoners without thinking of incarceration as either a deterrent or extracting hard time to "pay back society" for evils done. Other self-described Christians believe in abortion, while others strongly oppose it.

People use scriptural passages to posit teachings and perspectives that are quite novel. For example, some read the Bible and come, somehow, to believe that Jesus was not a historical figure and the Bible is not an accurate record of his life. Others believe Jesus was a real man, but that he was a homosexual who enjoyed frequent orgies with his Twelve Disciples and women having troubled pasts, like Mary Magdalene-- whom many believe was a former, reformed prostitute. These are only a handful of examples but, really, need I continue?

So, what about the two questions I have posed?


Why Do People Interpret the Bible Differently?

If you'll stick with me, I'll use a couple of technical words-- but I believe it'll make perfect sense. I think it's important, however, to keep in mind that the problem I've described is usually due to all of the following issues I'll describe, so it's important to keep them all in front of you when you discuss matters like this with those whom you disagree.

People claiming to be Christians come to different opinions about ethical and other matters because of: differing views on biblical inspiration, different hermeneutics, different exegesis, and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, who helps illuminate one's mind to 'truth.'

1. Differing Views of Inspiration

How you "approach" the Bible makes all the difference in how you interpret it. There are numerous different approaches to or "views of" inspiration. These range from vague notions where the biblical writers felt 'inspired to write' just as Shakespeare was inspired... to views of inspiration that imply the human recorders of scripture fell into a trance where they were controlled by a divine force who wrote through them, without regard to their own experiences, emotions, or perspectives-- they were merely "mediums" or something like that.

Those who take a "low" or loose view of scripture invariably come to looser and more liberal views of ethics, morality, and biblical teachings-- while those who take a high view of scripture invariably come to a more solid view of Biblical teachings and, generally, come to hold views more consistent with a clear, straight-forward reading of the Bible-- which is often considered more conservative or progressive, but not often liberal.

How does one decide which view to take? It's simple... If one is a believer in Christ OR if one has come to believe that the Holy Bible is from God and that it articulates God's perspective and, literally, "truth," then that person would hold a high view of scripture. Such people naturally believe that God is our ultimate authority, so they want to know exactly what He says. In addition, those people believe that God knows everything-- so learning from Him and seeking to live consistently with scriptural teachings-- is a way to live a blessed life and one with great meaning, regardless of how much pain life may or may not deal out. In this view, pain doesn't imply God's disfavor-- what matters is devotion to God, obedience to His Word, and seeking His perspective in order to gain meaning in life.


2. Different Hermeneutical Methods

Hermeneutics simply means "the art and science of interpretation." More specifically, it is the discipline that investigates the principles and theories that govern how to properly interpret a text-- especially the Bible, and its different parts.

As such, hermeneutics is also concerned with understanding how the human author of a particular Bible book should relate to the content being presented, and how that should relate to the original readers of the biblical passage and to those who read those same verses of scripture today. So that is the so-called "hermeneutical bridge"-- namely, what did it mean in the mind of the writer as that person understood the mind of God, and what did that mean to the people to whom it was addressed... and what application does that timeless truth have for us today? That is the job of hermeneutics-- and that is the job of every person who teaches the Bible or seeks to properly interpret the Bible.


3. Different Approaches to Exegesis

People also come to different beliefs on ethical/moral/biblical issues because of their "exegetical approach" which is closely related to their hermeneutic, mentioned above. Exegesis is related to the word "educate" but, in this sense, means "to draw meaning out of." To educate means "to draw out" or "to lead." Certainly, when one does proper exegesis, he or she is educating a person in the purest sense of the word.

At any rate, exegesis is the process of seeking to understand what a text means or communicates in its unretouched, unfiltered original meaning. In other words, good exegesis seeks to provide the plain sense of what a particular portion of scripture (verse/verses) means. Metaphorically, it implies looking closely at the scriptures with spiritual glasses that have exacting and accurate lens that are able to view the accurate meaning of the original author. Exegesis is concerned with telling us what the original author meant-- as opposed to simply telling us "what it means TO US." The point of exegesis is that it doesn't matter what we think of it UNTIL WE FIRST find out what it meant originally. Only after we apprehend the original meaning can we properly and accurately apply it to us. So in this way, hermeneutics provide the means for us to exegete scripture. Proper hermeneutics leads to proper exegesis-- and that can safely lead us to an accurate interpretation and application of God's Word on all matters of importance in human life (2 Timothy 3:16-17).


4. The indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, who helps illuminate one's mind to 'truth.'

1 Corinthians 1:18-through chapter 2 in the New Testament talks a lot about this. In short, it simply means that people who profess to be Christians but who do not possess the presence of God within them, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, may be religionists or socially religious practitioners, but they fail to meet the biblical description of a person who is a biblical or born-again Christian (1 John, chapters 4-5), especially 1 John 4:13-17.

When a person has this type of intimate, indwelling reality of "Christ in us," such a person is given a special type of relationship with God in which truth is more readily realized, perceived, and experienced. Illumination has to do with God guiding you in and toward "truth." People without this indwelling-- whether or not they 'profess' to be Christians (because professing and possessing are two different things), do not have the same capacity to apprehend truth as a person who legitimately enjoys a relationship with God through Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God.

Why Does It Matter?

The reason it is important to properly interpret the scriptures and where they land on different issues, is because "truth matters." Truth represents reality. And if we are incorrect on our view of what is true, that means we are living in a false reality. Our perception does not create reality-- all that really matters is what is ACTUAL and REAL. When we base our beliefs on false ideas that are not true, but only propaganda, the problem is that we then ACT on those false beliefs. When we act on false beliefs, ramifications follow-- and those ramifications are often destructive.

So when a person interprets something wrong or comes up with the incorrect position on a moral or ethical or political or economic view, there are real consequences to those ideas. This could include making mistakes that lead to many detrimental effects on our lives that affect both ourselves and others. That is why, however painful reality can be, it's less painful than living in false hope, holding onto a lie, that only ends up allowing one's life to collapse like a house of cards. "And great was the fall of that house, for it was not built upon a rock."

That's why truth matters.

Eavesdropping in my Conversation with a Friend about the Canonization of Scripture, Part 1 of 2

Question Posed To Me By a Good Friend (that I thought I might make available to you)

I'd like you to shed some light on the idea of "Divine Inspiration" of the Holy Bible and the selection of the books we consider to be the "Word of God." Is there a theological concept of 'divine selection?' There are different 'canonizations' out there, like the Jewish Bible, the Deuterocanonical writings, and the various Vulgate versions (e.g., Jerome's, Gutenberg, Clementine, and the Nova Vulgate).


My Thoughts

Good questions.

I started to write a really long treatise on this, because it is so important and needs treatment on any number of levels to be an adequate answer.

What I then did was to locate this "summary article" that is written by one of the best thinkers in the world, one whom I respect and who taught at a school that I formerly attended. I'm going to give the link below, but will also give some other perspective, just so you can get a few specific tidbits about the specific questions you have. Still, this article is so outstanding, it will help you clarify these issues greatly, giving you lots of inner peace.

Beyond that, here are a few other tid bits.

The key to divine inspiration is that the Bible represents the only divinely authorized sacred text in existence. Meaning, this is God's self-disclosure and only authorized autobiographical/biographi

cal work in existence. But, as you've asked, beyond that-- how do we think about the selection of the books?

It's important to understand that the books "recognized" as authoritative and "scripture" were not haphazardly chosen, which is what some who wish to have unbounded moral freedom would have us believe. They believe that, if they cast doubt on the selection of books, then that jeopardizes the authorship and, hence, the authority of the Bible.

Essentially, it worked this way: The books were given by what conservative evangelicals and others call "Verbal Plenary Inspiration." This is one of about 7-9 views of inspiration. Those theories of inspiration range from viewing "inspiration" as being nothing more than a slightly heightened sense of awareness... to the human writers being nothing more than entranced copyists who fell into a divinely-induced trance. Serious Bible-Believing Scholars generally agree that the Bible was given by verbal-plenary inspiration, meaning that God gave the content of the book and, while allowing freedom to the author to express his or her general attitudes, personalities, emotions, and so on-- that God superintended the ULTIMATE PRODUCT so that (a) the writer was supernaturally enabled to ensure that the individual words chosen were in accordance with God intended and were free from error-- and (b) that the final autographs (the original book the writer completed) were wholly, as a complete document, free from error (inerrant). Then, Bible-believing scholars agree (and insist, due to specific passages of scripture such as 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:19-21) that though thousands of copies of those originals (autographs) were copied (viz., manuscripts), that the careful evaluation of those as a whole by qualified biblical scholars has given us a clear and still accurate understanding of exactly what God originally intended. This is a view called "preservation." We know from textual evidence (the 24000 partial, whole, and fragmental pieces of ancient manuscripts, including the 5200 or so complete ancient manuscripts), that even the copyists of those originals were in 96% agreement, with (a) the remaining 4% of differences being on non-essential and non-doctrinal issues (unspecific, minor words) and (b) that those 4% can be explained by obvious slips of the quill of the copyists, alternative spellings for words between different dialects of languages, and obsolete words that were replaced by future generations, and the like. ALL OF THAT TO SAY that we have solid certainty about the authority of the text in general.

Then, 5 tests (described in the document I sent-- I checked to make sure it was in there) were applied by the church and its global leadership to ensure that the books which were being evaluated for inclusion into the Holy Bible met each and every of these obvious and clearly biblical standards.

That said, though you are right in saying that there are some differences in opinion between Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism today, it's more easily explained than it seems. But first note that, those branches of modern churches are not authoritative on these matters, because believers of the ancient Jewish faith before Christ and the Early Church, as a whole, established these facts about what was and wasn't scripture. More recent waffling on these issues doesn't change the global and collective agreement that stood for centuries. But the gist of it is this: Deuterocanonical works are just that-- deutero (secondary) canonical (standards). Meaning, they are "edifying reading" but not authoritative-- but still generally better than, say, a romance novel. So they have some historical or religious merit, but are not scripture. Think of them as ancient Christian novels or ancient Christian historical-narratives, with some bias and some potential errors (factual and/or theological), but still... somewhat valuable. Now, of course, we have newer reflections on things that exceed the value and accuracy of the deuterocanonical writings, so many of those newer writings are of greater insight, accuracy and worth than the DC writings-- hence, I study those more than I take time for DC books like Judith, Ecclesiasticus, etc. But those DC books were NEVER considered scripture, equal to the Bible. But because of Roman Catholic elevation of them and their relative value in the early centuries of the church, they were sometimes included as Christian writings after the biblical writings-- but never simply interspersed with the scriptures themselves.. They would appear in groupings, etc. Other words, such as the Pseudopigrapha in particular-- (pseudo/false pigraph/writings-- are known to be spurious, so they are even further out and less reliable than even the DC writings (apocrypha), so they hardly, if ever, appear beside scripture. These are books like the Gospel of Thomas (which wasn't)... that things like the DaVinci Code was based on, and so forth.

When scripture was established by the global community of faith-- there was nearly immediately universal agreement on the books of scripture. The Old Testament canon was established very early as it was being written (through the tests of canonicity) and the New Testament was as well. The only exceptions were very limited and regional differences among some smaller factions (such as a group that may have objected to including Esther because the name of God didn't technically appear), but those disagreements were dispensed with quickly and global consensus cleared up those matters. Only later, as less informed people and even unbelievers crept into churches and began to push the legitimacy of some books (e.g., such as today, where many Roman Catholics value certain DC books-- but aren't, themselves, even bonafide and legitimate believers who honor biblical teachings on what salvation and the church are, for example). So, yes, on the surface, this seems to have confused the issue-- but no Bible belieiving Christian who is abreast on the facts is confused by these things.

One other thing-- differences in things like the Vulgate, though I'm not an expert on it-- are due to a few things (a) the fact that the Vulgate represents a less technical and 'vulgar' or 'low brow, colloquial' type of language-- as opposed to the higher, technical language that would be more appropriate for theological language-- but less suited for a less-educated populus (think of how more accurate you could explain something with the complete English language versus explaining technical issues with only a 600 word vocabulary that is under the 7th grade reading level-- you get the idea); (b) as time went on and language changed-- as all living languages do, nuances and etymologies and meanings of some words changed, leading to variances of words between dialects, regions (just like Cuban Spanish and Mexican Spanish may differ), and so on-- so that affected how some words were understood and written; (c) finally, for the sake of time and brevity, different publishers and scholars had varying opinions and budgets to work from, and some we know chose to include footnotes in the text and explanatory notes, historical pieces that shed light on some texts, and other glosses as they may be called, and this led to the differences. Just as different writing styles and formatting approaches (like APA, MLA, and so on are used today here, and different ones may be used elsewhere in the world), different companies publishing Bibles with different scholars included different things.

Eavesdropping in my Conversation With a Friend About Canonization of Scripture (Part 2 of 2)

Follow Up Question (related to the last blog I wrote):

Are you saying that, as the books of the Bible were being written that they were becoming canonized (pronounced as Holy Writ and placed in the Bible as scripture)? That is to say, were we working with an open canon for quite some time, during both the Old and New Testament times?


Answer

It worked this way.

As the texts were being written... (around 1500BC-400BC for the Old Testament, and 40-100 AD for the New Testament), there were these general understandings that the People of Israel/Jews had about this literature they were exposed to, as there were with the New Testament writings (which, again, came MUCH closer together and were more widely circulated, because the Christian Church was geographically spread apart than Israel and Judah). So there were a 'little' differences between Jewish perspectives about authoritative tests and that of the Christian church, but that's too technical to really matter here.

So let's don't get tripped up on the word 'canonized.' That's showing a more Roman Catholic perspective, and we want to think in terms of the New Testament period and that of ancient Judaism, not to suspend a several-centuries later perspective on it.

So what happened was that the people of God were exposed to both false prophets and prophets/apostles of God throughout time. Some of them had writings that were ostensibly received from God. As the people of God heard or read these things, the Spirit of God bore witness in the hearts of people, along with the tests of canonicity-- general principles that were taken into consideration, that these were (or were not) the Word of God. (Keep in mind, when you read the Gospel of Mark, you don't have to be a theologian with a Ph.D. to know it is God speaking, if you follow me). But the people of God quickly and immediately identified certain books as scripture. And as they were being identified and written, more and more were accepted (and others were universally rejected, like the apocrypha and pseudopigrapha, etc.). And as this happened in real time, over centuries, as God dynamically gave His word and self-revelation to people, the 'canon' grew. When the Old Testament was completed in or around the 400s, it was already an established fact which books were official. Later on, like in the article below, because of some later challenges by smaller factions of people who probably weren't even true believers and the like, there were sometimes a need to 'reaffirm' or 'clarify' officially what was universally known, accepted, believed, and taught all along. So when groups like this met, they sometimes reminded people of what they believed and sometimes offered a statement publically to summarize their beliefs. So, like at Jamnia below, there were times when the "canon" was identified in writing and it became a part of the historical record we have. And that's fine and no problem.

The problem is that, because churches like Catholicism think that their church and their bishops speak for God in an official authoritative way-- in ways that go beyond scripture, I might add-- and when they do this, they make statements that make the untrained theological eye believe that they had the authority to make official pronouncements about canonizing scripture and establishing what scripture was, etc. While, in fact, that was already established by the people of God, universally, in the past. There was no need for any canonization because (and this is my central point), HUMANITY CANNOT 'CANONIZE' AND DICTATE WHAT GOD'S WORD IS OR WHAT THE BIBLE IS-- GOD DOES THAT. GOD DICTATES WHAT HIS WORD IS AND HE DETERMINES WHAT THE BIBLE BOOKS ARE... THEY DON'T NEED THE APPROVAL OF SOME CHURCH BODY LED BY IMPERFECT PRIESTS. The fact that they are from God is a self-justifying reality and they are easily identified as scripture, and it is God (not we) who establishes the canon. We only recognize and affirm what it is, we don't determine it. However, through discernment, we can compare other writings against the established canon, and through that, we speak to establish what ISN'T THE CANON. So the church's job is one of polemics and apologetics.

Polemics is when Christian leaders speak to the church and clear up confusion to people inside the church and call out on the carpet false teachers pushing false teachings and false books. Apologetics is when Christians defend the faith against unbelievers outside the church. I hope that makes sense.

So, like at Jamnia, the point wasn't to "try to figure out what books will be included in the Bible" but to come to consensus among those people (who didn't have universal authority in the church in the first place) regarding issues about certain scriptural questions they had. Just like today, if there was an issue we needed to really establish clarity on, we could call a church council to discuss and try to DISCOVER what God said about the matter-- and not to create a policy about it. God has spoken, and our job is to discover what He said and to then communicate that-- our job isn't to speak for Him by putting words in his mouth.

So canonicity was God's people agreeing publically and "for the record" stating the obvious and helping, once and for all, to promote ideas that were already widely understood and accepted-- and to clarify minor issues related to those topics as well.

Final point:

Because the Bible came to us not as one finished book, but as it was being revealed in real time in history by God at the appointed time-- it HAD to be 'open' during those days.

But, at the completion of Revelation, God made it clear there (in chapter 21 or 22) that it was the concluding authoritative book, and said so. This officially CLOSED the canon, so now we know that any and all books (form the pseudopigrapha to the Quran to others) that claim equal status to scripture are in error, because God made that clear. And that's why there has never been any serious challenge to what is authentic canon since that time. Only small factions of uninformed activists ever dream up these ideas, but the universal church speaks against those things and they never materalize, because it's clear to the church what is and what isn't scripture.