How to interpret the Holy Bible?

[DiscipleOfTruth]

How should a person determine if the intended interpretation of a scripture should be literal or figurative?

[Slopeshoulder]

The golden rule of biblical interpretation is that usually the plainest sense or interpretation most closely resembles what GOD wants us to do or know.

peace

Actually this is the worst rule imaginable. It's also ungrounded. Ignore it.

[McCulloch]

This question highlights a very serious shortcoming in the theology that would have the Holy Bible be God's direct and complete communication to humanity. The Bible itself contains little or no instructions or examples useful in answering the questions in the OP. One other serious shortcoming is that the Bible itself does not contain an inspired table of contents, leaving it to human wisdom to determine which writings to include or exclude. Therefore, the probability that this book is a direct communication from a perfect and omniscient being is close to zero.

[DiscipleOfTruth]

So you're saying it's impossible to have a correct understanding of the Bible without faith?

It would seem that way. The Bible was written, apparently somewhat cryptically and the magic secret decoder is the Holy Spirit. Without the Spirit of God to guide you, the deeper meanings of the words will be impossible for you to decipher.
Right?

Well, though I am not a christian anymore I often find myself imagining what kind of person I would of been if I never turned away from faith. It's very strange in a way, in my mind it is a what if scenario where I let this former version of myself continue to live in my imagination to go through many hypothetical situations. This is something I observe for my own curiousity and interest. What I find is that I have a very good idea that feels 100% accurate to what I would be like. All of this being bridged to my mentally noted characterlistics to when I was at my strongest in faith. From what I read I have a very good idea what the christian God and the Holy Spirit are suppose to be like. When I read the Bible to practice the improvement of my interpretation I use the mind frame that I would have if I never stopped being a christian to acknowledge what I and some christians would agree on. Based on this information, I don't see much of a difference in my results from if I was to actually have faith and pretending that I still do in certain situations.

As unbelievers I strongly believe you and I should be very careful before believing that we need faith to have a correct understanding of the Bible. Such a belief would imply that the believer is probably right about the existence of all things related to God and that we are probably wrong. It also implies that we can't debate with them about their beliefs because our understanding of the source(The Bible) of their beliefs is probably inferior to thier understanding.

[Holyspirit213]

The bible consists of chapters of obiedience and then love of freedom. Both somewhat falls under the category of true obiedience from the heart. For example, Jesus Christ preached love of sisterhood and brotherhood but people nowadays misinterpret as marriages and dating.

[Holyspirit213]

The state of mind can be interpret it as two things. The known and the unknown. One cannot explore the other without being figuratively speaking open to god. God is the ultimate source of the mind. Given that god dominates all known sources it is hard to know what is really real or not. The known world that is pressed unto our minds is only meaningful in a sense that all are wired into one system of beliefs. To unplug is to let go of the sources surrounding logic and to dive into the world of the unknown, simply known as faith. To be able to let go you need to know the facts surrounding you. Then release it accordingly with your beliefs of the faith.

[greentwiga]

I grew up as a scientist. I became a chemist in college and worked as one for many years. I even worked with a group that did carbon dating and corrected the results with data from tree rings of known ages.

Saying that, I am also a Christian with training in Biblical interpretation. I struggled with the stories of Adam, Noah, and most of the Pentateuch. Finally, I studied them using the rules of Biblical interpretation I had learned at a fundamentalist college. I was amazed at the accuracy of the stories.

Just take one fact. The garden was said to be between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This still leaves a broad area. Then I saw that both figs and bread were mentioned in the context of the garden. I studied up on the locations of wild figs and wild wheat. Wheat grows all over the region but between the two rivers, it is limited. It can't grow in regions that receive less than about 200 mm of rain. It also can't grow high up the Taurus mountains. Figs are similar except they need more rain than wheat. The region that contains both figs and wheat is a small region, perhaps 200 mi. wide and 100 mi north to south. The extremes of the region are not luxurious, so the garden region is smaller. The garden had to be in that region. People have harvested the wild wheat in the best regions in the area and concluded a family could harvest enough in two weeks to last them all year.

Since the Bible describes four rivers, it has to be on the watershed divide between the rivers. I concluded that only one mountain satisfied the description, Karacadag. I also concluded that whether or not Adam was the first man, he was definitely the first farmer. I predicted that wheat farming was invented on or near the Mountain. Months later, I was reading a scientific article examining the DNA of wild and domestic wheats. It concluded that all domestic wheat came from a small area on or near Karacadag. This was in the center of the wheat region where it grew the best.

Similar literal interpretations of the other stories, such as Noah, lead to scientifically believable stories. One of the problems that most people have not mentioned in this thread is communication. People of 5,000 years ago told the stories that the people of 5,000 years ago readily understood. People of 3,500 years ago told stories that their listeners understood. When we interpret the stories using modern thinking, we misinterpret the message. For example, we only know about wooden oceangoing ships before 1850 AD, so we use our knowledge to read that Noah built a wooden boat. Careful studying the scriptures shows a giant reed boat, the only kind they had in 3,000 BC.

Similar is our understanding of Day. We need to know what the ancients meant. The Bible has other meanings, even in Genesis 2. For us to insist that it could only be the modern meaning of 24 hours imposes a meaning that may not have been meant.

Thus, I would start with a literal meaning and only go for a figurative meaning if the passage demands it. I wrote these example to show that even the most difficult passages, ones that we are tempted to interpret figuratively, can be literal.

[Jayhawker Soule]

Similar is our understanding of Day. We need to know what the ancients meant.

So, for example, it could have meant kangaroo, or perhaps corn flakes.

Concern about "what the ancients meant" is driven solely by the failure of the text to make sense when taken literally, i.e., exegesis driven by embarrassment. The far more rational view would be to recognize that we are dealing with the redacted, ancient oral lore of a people, heavily influenced by the surrounding lore, and ignorant of science.

[Nickman]

The golden rule of biblical interpretation is that usually the plainest sense or interpretation most closely resembles what GOD wants us to do or know.

peace

Do you define "plain" as "literal"? That certainly wouldn't be the case when reading about the teachings of Jesus, which were so often metaphorical.

some things are literal and others are metaphorical or symbolic... when reading the text you can determine which is which by the context of the passage you are reading. You are probably better off asking about specific verses and looking at them individually.

If it goes against modern understanding, logic and reason, then the bible clearly is figurative . LOL. This seems to be the way most people view the bible. Most people will never admit that the bible could be wrong and literal on subjects that we now know to be false ideas of natural occurences.

[greentwiga]

Similar is our understanding of Day. We need to know what the ancients meant.

So, for example, it could have meant kangaroo, or perhaps corn flakes.

Concern about "what the ancients meant" is driven solely by the failure of the text to make sense when taken literally, i.e., exegesis driven by embarrassment. The far more rational view would be to recognize that we are dealing with the redacted, ancient oral lore of a people, heavily influenced by the surrounding lore, and ignorant of science.

There seems to be several concepts within the Bible. If you look at Genesis 1, many want to interpret the 6 days of creation as being 6 24 hour days with no time gaps. Within Genesis 1, though, is a statement that the light period is called day and the dark period is called night. Now we have a 12 hour period being the definition of day. Either both are true, or creation occurred with gaps, the 12 hours of night being the gap between each day of creation.

The earth and the sun were created on or before the first day according to Gen 1 and man was created on day 6. In Gen 2:4, we are given the account of heaven and earth on the day they were made. This account includes the creation of man. Now, according to the Bible, one day covers six days.

In the same verse, the word account is literally generations. I Gen 5:1, the account or generations of Adam cover ten generations and thousands of years. Back to Gen 2:4, The day is generations long. It includes Adam, Seth, and Enosh, 3 generations. It could include many more Generations. Biblical genealogies frequently dropped many. The genealogy of David, for example, has to be missing around ten generations. All this, we are told is on the day God made the Heavens and Earth.

Which definition of day was being used in Gen 1? 24 hour? 12 hour? 6 day? or the many generation day?

The one thing I must be careful to not do is put in modern definitions that the ancients, (people of 2,000, 3,000, or more years ago) didn't use. As a modern example, I was talking with a Hindu, and he talked about his cousin. He was actually talking about his fourth cousin, a very distant relative, but I only include my first cousins in the definition of cousin. It caused some confusion.

If the Bible includes several definitions of Day, then they are all possible candidates for Gen 1, without imposing some foreign concept, such as "day" can only mean 24 hours.

[ttruscott]

The golden rule of biblical interpretation is that usually the plainest sense or interpretation most closely resembles what GOD wants us to do or know.

peace

Actually this is the worst rule imaginable. It's also ungrounded. Ignore it.

I would like to pass on to you, in a very short discourse, what GOD has lead me to believe...(from a longer work):

First, I believe that to correctly interpret the Bible, one must accept it as the authority it claims to be, to wit: the Book of (by, from) GOD. In other words, one must eventually become willing to obey or trust in the message if you happen to find one.

Second, one must determine the correct text (what did the original say?) for which study there is a set of rules to guide the student[6]. In other words, is the translation you're reading correct?

Third, one must correctly interpret the text (what did the writer really mean when he said what he said?) for which there is a set of rules also.[7]Well, I hope that you can now see that obtaining good assurance as to the correctness of one's interpretations of the Bible does not come easily. It takes some hard intellectual work and study, and even then one might not be right.

Well, as if this was not tough enough, it gets even harder because every interpretation seems to have its share of experts and priests proclaiming its authenticity. This leads us to another aspect of the problem, to wit: that even if your expert or priest knows all the rules on how to correctly interpret the Bible, often it is written in such a way[8] that even such learned people need one more thing to arrive at the correct interpretation. This wild card aspect of interpreting the Bible is called the illumination of the Holy Spirit, and He does not give it to everyone.

[Herein lies one of the reasons for why we get so many denominations. Certain Scriptures can be interpreted more than one way, even after one has applied all the rules, and in such instances we are left with only our own, or some (S)spirit's illumination, to guide us on the path.]

In other words, in the final analysis, it is not so much how much you know (although this is extremely important) but it is (W)who knows you that determines the correctness of your interpretation.

Now, I hope that this does not make you want to keep your Bible on the shelf as has been the honoured tradition of so many Christians for so long. Rather, I hope you might see that interpreting the Bible is not a light matter, and that if you are going to successfully escape some of satan's pit falls through some study of the Bible (rather than falling into one through your study of the Word) both a correct attitude toward GOD and some diligent study will be required.

Now, having brought all this to your attention, I would like to add one more thing, which is the number one rule of scriptural interpretation:

The golden rule of biblical interpretation is that usually the plainest sense or interpretation most closely resembles what GOD wants us to do or know.

Now although this seems to be very easy, such things are never allowed to be so simple as to make the illumination of the Holy Spirit unnecessary. Therefore, GOD has put in some exceptions to the rule and of course, everyone seems to have a different number of them, for there are some hard to understand figures of speech and symbols, et cetera, and most of all, as soon as a Scripture in its plainest sense fails to line up with the prevailing theological presuppositions of the reader, that Scripture quickly becomes an exception to this golden rule.

Notes:

1 - God, Yhwh, He = an individual Person of the triune Godhead.

They, Their, Them = two or three Members of the Godhead.

GOD, YHWH, HE = the GODHEAD viewed incorporately as ONE.

PERsons, THEir, THEm = GOD plus any number of Their creatures.

...

6 - This discipline is called Textual Criticism and the rules are called canons. (http://www.skypoint.com/members/waltzmn ... fCrit.html)

7 - This discipline is called Hermeneutics or Exegetical Theology, which is “that branch of theological learning which deals with the interpretation of the Scriptures and the subjects therewith connected.� (Webster's Dictionary #1.)

8 - For example, it often leaves out the very word that would clarify the meaning of a certain verse. It "seems" to be left out because it is to be "understood", most likely only by those to whom the Holy Spirit gives the right word to put in the hole. It definitely is an holey book!

Peace, Ted