Hermeneutics

The ways people interpret the Bible cause unneeded suffering and avoidable stupidities. I’ve often said that if I believed everything I’ve heard from preachers, I’d be a raving lunatic. Just read the Bible for its plain sense, some people say. Yet a 21st-century view of a passage can be very different from what was intended from within 1st-century cultures and understanding of the world. Correctly interpreting the Bible takes some effort, and that is why I’ve always been suspicious of devotional approaches to reading the Bible because Christians get thinking that the Holy Spirit is leading them to do all kinds of crazy things. “No, the Bible is not saying that,” is sometimes the best response to them.

Another fallacy is the notion that one must interpret the Bible literally unless there is a reason not to. This is a major problem of fundamentalists and sometimes even evangelicals that is so important to them that they even use it to define who is in their ballpark and who isn’t. Sometimes there are several layers of meanings to passages, none of which may be literal. Why would one ever want to interpret poetry literally even if it’s possible? Saying that literal interpretations of the Bible should be primary, is simply an assertion, an opinion, only one of several ways to interpret.

Those who think that feminist hermeneutics started in the 1960’s only have to look at the several denominations like the Nazarenes who have held gender equality in high esteem for their full existence.