A recent exchange on another thread here on TheologyOnline struck me as a nearly perfect example of a problem that comes up constantly in discussions about Scripture:
That last remark is what caught my attention. It reveals a way of thinking about Scripture that I genuinely find difficult to understand. The implied argument seems to be that if one person claims a passage means something different from what another person claims, then both interpretations are ultimately only matters of preference. Derf's statement amounts to, "If you can make the Bible mean what you want it to mean, then why cannot I do the same?" But that is not an argument about interpretation. On the contrary, it is the abandonment of interpretation.
I can and do understand the frustration that can produce that kind of reply. When someone appears to force a text into a preconceived mold, the temptation is strong to dismiss the whole exercise as special pleading, but the problem is that the dismissal itself gives up the only ground on which any interpretation can be tested.
The Bible is written in language, and language works, it successfully communicates information, because words have meaning and because grammar, syntax, context and ordinary usage constrain that meaning. If those constraints did not exist, communication would be impossible. When I say that a chair is sitting beside a table, I have communicated something definite. You may misunderstand me. I may have expressed myself poorly. Perhaps the word “table” refers to something unusual in a particular context. There may be additional facts that clarify exactly what I meant. None of that makes the sentence infinitely pliable. It does not mean that you are equally justified in deciding that I meant a horse is standing in a river. Words exclude particular meanings as surely as they communicate them. That is why language works, and the same constraints apply when reading Scripture.
Interpretation does not create meaning, but presupposes it. We interpret precisely because something has already been communicated and we are attempting to understand what it is. If meaning comes into existence only when the reader supplies it, then there is no such thing as a correct or incorrect interpretation. There are only different reactions to marks on a page. The very concept of misunderstanding therefore presupposes that the words meant something before the reader began deciding what they meant.
And to be clear, a "plain reading" of Scripture does not mean a shallow reading, a wooden reading or a refusal to recognize figures of speech, idioms, symbolism or distinctions produced by context. It does not mean grabbing one English sentence in isolation and insisting that the first thought that enters our mind must be what God intended. A plain reading means reading the text as language is ordinarily read. We take the words seriously, we pay attention to grammar, we notice who is speaking and who is being spoken too. We pay attention to what question is being addressed, what has already been said and to what follows. We recognize metaphor when the text gives us reason to recognize metaphor. We recognize distinctions when the author makes distinctions. Most importantly, we assume that the writer intended to communicate something and that the meaning of what he wrote can therefore be discovered rather than invented.
Romans 9:6 is a particularly useful example. Paul writes, “For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel.” The sentence contains the word Israel twice, but it does not follow that Paul is teaching the proposition “Israel is not Israel.” If both occurrences of the word, "Israel" meant precisely the same thing in precisely the same respect, then Paul would simply be contradicting himself. He would be saying something nonsensical, and there is no reason to suppose Paul was writing nonsense. The sentence itself tells us that Paul is using the term Israel in two related but distinct senses, and the surrounding argument must determine precisely what that distinction is. The verses that immediately follow begin discussing physical descent, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Esau and the children of the promise, so whatever interpretation one ultimately adopts has to account for that context. One may debate the precise nature of the distinction or how it relates to the body of Christ, but one cannot legitimately erase the distinction and then pretend that the verse is teaching the bare contradiction “Israel is not Israel.”
I'm not trying here to suggest that this is the precise point that Derf was attempting to make the passage say. My point is broader than whatever it was Derf was thinking. My point is that disagreement over interpretation is not settled by accusing the other person of reading into the text whatever he wants. Perhaps he is doing exactly that, but if so, it must be demonstrated. If someone says a verse means something, the appropriate response is to ask whether the words, grammar and context support that meaning. If they do not, then the interpretation is wrong. If they do, then it does not become wrong merely because the conclusion is inconvenient to someone else. The text itself is the authority over both readers. Neither person gets to decide what the passage means simply because he prefers one conclusion over another.
Consider the disastrous nature of the alternative. If Scripture means whatever a reader wants or needs it to mean, then Scripture does not actually communicate anything at all. There would be no such thing as misunderstanding a passage because there would be no objective meaning available to misunderstand. There would only be one reader’s reaction competing with another reader’s reaction. Bible study would cease to be an attempt to discover what the text says and would become a contest over whose preferred interpretation is more persuasive, more popular or more convenient. At that point there is no meaningful distinction between exegesis and mere imagination.
Worse still, the claim that Scripture is so pliable that readers simply make it mean whatever they want is self-defeating. Anyone making that claim expects his own words to be interpreted according to their ordinary meaning. When someone says, “How nice to have such a convenient bible,” he intends that sentence to communicate a particular accusation. If the other person replied, “I interpret that to mean that you completely agree with me,” the response would rightly be that such an interpretation is absurd. Why? Because the speaker’s words had an intended meaning that the hearer was not free to replace with one of his own choosing. The person who denies objective meaning in Scripture necessarily relies upon objective meaning every time he makes the denial.
This does not mean that every passage is equally easy to understand. Some texts are difficult. Some require knowledge of historical setting, idioms or specialized terminology. Some contain genuine ambiguities that may not be easily resolved. Human beings can misunderstand even ordinary speech, and Scripture is no exception. But none of that changes the underlying principle. Difficulty in discovering meaning does not imply the absence of meaning. The mere fact that two people disagree does not establish that both interpretations are equally legitimate. One may be right, both may be wrong, or one may understand part of the passage correctly while missing another part. The disagreement is resolved, to whatever degree it can be resolved, by returning to the text and making arguments from what is actually there.
There is something deeply unhealthy about treating every appeal to the plain meaning of Scripture as though it were merely a disguised attempt to force the Bible to say what one already believes. Certainly people do force their beliefs onto Scripture and we do all have biases, traditions and assumptions that can distort our reading. It is precisely because that danger is real that we need objective controls on interpretation. Grammar is such a control. Context is such a control. Definitions are such controls. Logical consistency is such a control. The author’s argument is such a control. These things do not guarantee that every reader will reach the correct interpretation, but without them there can be no interpretation at all.
The question, then, is not whether I like what a passage says or whether you like what it says. The question is whether either of us can demonstrate from the text that it says what we claim. If I say that a verse means something, I ought to be able to show why. If you say that it means something else, you ought to be able to do the same. Neither of us is entitled to rescue a weak interpretation by declaring that everyone is merely making the Bible say whatever he wants anyway as Derf's accusation directly implies. Such a response destroys the very concept of interpretation.
Scripture was written to communicate truth. If we are serious about understanding it, then our task is not to make the text say something useful, comfortable or doctrinally convenient. Our task is to read what is there, understand the distinctions the writers actually make, follow their arguments where they lead and allow the text to correct us when our assumptions do not survive contact with it. And that is what is meant by "the plain reading of Scripture". It is not simplistic literalism. It is simply the conviction that words mean things, authors intend things by the words they write, and readers are not free to substitute their own meaning for the one the text actually communicates.
Resting in Him,
Clete
RightDivider: The body of Christ is not Israel and Israel is not the body of Christ.
Derf: True. And Israel is not Israel, either:
Romans 9:6 KJV, “Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect. For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel:”
RightDivider: The verse does NOT say what you want it to say.
Par for the course with you.
Derf: It only says what you want it to say? How nice to have such a convenient bible.
That last remark is what caught my attention. It reveals a way of thinking about Scripture that I genuinely find difficult to understand. The implied argument seems to be that if one person claims a passage means something different from what another person claims, then both interpretations are ultimately only matters of preference. Derf's statement amounts to, "If you can make the Bible mean what you want it to mean, then why cannot I do the same?" But that is not an argument about interpretation. On the contrary, it is the abandonment of interpretation.
I can and do understand the frustration that can produce that kind of reply. When someone appears to force a text into a preconceived mold, the temptation is strong to dismiss the whole exercise as special pleading, but the problem is that the dismissal itself gives up the only ground on which any interpretation can be tested.
The Bible is written in language, and language works, it successfully communicates information, because words have meaning and because grammar, syntax, context and ordinary usage constrain that meaning. If those constraints did not exist, communication would be impossible. When I say that a chair is sitting beside a table, I have communicated something definite. You may misunderstand me. I may have expressed myself poorly. Perhaps the word “table” refers to something unusual in a particular context. There may be additional facts that clarify exactly what I meant. None of that makes the sentence infinitely pliable. It does not mean that you are equally justified in deciding that I meant a horse is standing in a river. Words exclude particular meanings as surely as they communicate them. That is why language works, and the same constraints apply when reading Scripture.
Interpretation does not create meaning, but presupposes it. We interpret precisely because something has already been communicated and we are attempting to understand what it is. If meaning comes into existence only when the reader supplies it, then there is no such thing as a correct or incorrect interpretation. There are only different reactions to marks on a page. The very concept of misunderstanding therefore presupposes that the words meant something before the reader began deciding what they meant.
And to be clear, a "plain reading" of Scripture does not mean a shallow reading, a wooden reading or a refusal to recognize figures of speech, idioms, symbolism or distinctions produced by context. It does not mean grabbing one English sentence in isolation and insisting that the first thought that enters our mind must be what God intended. A plain reading means reading the text as language is ordinarily read. We take the words seriously, we pay attention to grammar, we notice who is speaking and who is being spoken too. We pay attention to what question is being addressed, what has already been said and to what follows. We recognize metaphor when the text gives us reason to recognize metaphor. We recognize distinctions when the author makes distinctions. Most importantly, we assume that the writer intended to communicate something and that the meaning of what he wrote can therefore be discovered rather than invented.
Romans 9:6 is a particularly useful example. Paul writes, “For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel.” The sentence contains the word Israel twice, but it does not follow that Paul is teaching the proposition “Israel is not Israel.” If both occurrences of the word, "Israel" meant precisely the same thing in precisely the same respect, then Paul would simply be contradicting himself. He would be saying something nonsensical, and there is no reason to suppose Paul was writing nonsense. The sentence itself tells us that Paul is using the term Israel in two related but distinct senses, and the surrounding argument must determine precisely what that distinction is. The verses that immediately follow begin discussing physical descent, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Esau and the children of the promise, so whatever interpretation one ultimately adopts has to account for that context. One may debate the precise nature of the distinction or how it relates to the body of Christ, but one cannot legitimately erase the distinction and then pretend that the verse is teaching the bare contradiction “Israel is not Israel.”
I'm not trying here to suggest that this is the precise point that Derf was attempting to make the passage say. My point is broader than whatever it was Derf was thinking. My point is that disagreement over interpretation is not settled by accusing the other person of reading into the text whatever he wants. Perhaps he is doing exactly that, but if so, it must be demonstrated. If someone says a verse means something, the appropriate response is to ask whether the words, grammar and context support that meaning. If they do not, then the interpretation is wrong. If they do, then it does not become wrong merely because the conclusion is inconvenient to someone else. The text itself is the authority over both readers. Neither person gets to decide what the passage means simply because he prefers one conclusion over another.
Consider the disastrous nature of the alternative. If Scripture means whatever a reader wants or needs it to mean, then Scripture does not actually communicate anything at all. There would be no such thing as misunderstanding a passage because there would be no objective meaning available to misunderstand. There would only be one reader’s reaction competing with another reader’s reaction. Bible study would cease to be an attempt to discover what the text says and would become a contest over whose preferred interpretation is more persuasive, more popular or more convenient. At that point there is no meaningful distinction between exegesis and mere imagination.
Worse still, the claim that Scripture is so pliable that readers simply make it mean whatever they want is self-defeating. Anyone making that claim expects his own words to be interpreted according to their ordinary meaning. When someone says, “How nice to have such a convenient bible,” he intends that sentence to communicate a particular accusation. If the other person replied, “I interpret that to mean that you completely agree with me,” the response would rightly be that such an interpretation is absurd. Why? Because the speaker’s words had an intended meaning that the hearer was not free to replace with one of his own choosing. The person who denies objective meaning in Scripture necessarily relies upon objective meaning every time he makes the denial.
This does not mean that every passage is equally easy to understand. Some texts are difficult. Some require knowledge of historical setting, idioms or specialized terminology. Some contain genuine ambiguities that may not be easily resolved. Human beings can misunderstand even ordinary speech, and Scripture is no exception. But none of that changes the underlying principle. Difficulty in discovering meaning does not imply the absence of meaning. The mere fact that two people disagree does not establish that both interpretations are equally legitimate. One may be right, both may be wrong, or one may understand part of the passage correctly while missing another part. The disagreement is resolved, to whatever degree it can be resolved, by returning to the text and making arguments from what is actually there.
There is something deeply unhealthy about treating every appeal to the plain meaning of Scripture as though it were merely a disguised attempt to force the Bible to say what one already believes. Certainly people do force their beliefs onto Scripture and we do all have biases, traditions and assumptions that can distort our reading. It is precisely because that danger is real that we need objective controls on interpretation. Grammar is such a control. Context is such a control. Definitions are such controls. Logical consistency is such a control. The author’s argument is such a control. These things do not guarantee that every reader will reach the correct interpretation, but without them there can be no interpretation at all.
The question, then, is not whether I like what a passage says or whether you like what it says. The question is whether either of us can demonstrate from the text that it says what we claim. If I say that a verse means something, I ought to be able to show why. If you say that it means something else, you ought to be able to do the same. Neither of us is entitled to rescue a weak interpretation by declaring that everyone is merely making the Bible say whatever he wants anyway as Derf's accusation directly implies. Such a response destroys the very concept of interpretation.
Scripture was written to communicate truth. If we are serious about understanding it, then our task is not to make the text say something useful, comfortable or doctrinally convenient. Our task is to read what is there, understand the distinctions the writers actually make, follow their arguments where they lead and allow the text to correct us when our assumptions do not survive contact with it. And that is what is meant by "the plain reading of Scripture". It is not simplistic literalism. It is simply the conviction that words mean things, authors intend things by the words they write, and readers are not free to substitute their own meaning for the one the text actually communicates.
Resting in Him,
Clete