Ways of Interpreting Scripture

Overview

Recall questions on inspiration, the literal, allegorical and moral senses of scripture, Barth on the Word of God, Bultmann's demythologising, the rational, historical, sociological and literary approaches and their weaknesses, and the value of historical-critical study.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What do Christians mean when they call the Bible inspired?

   Model answer

   That God is in some way the source of what it contains, so that it is not merely a human record of religious experience. Beyond that, understandings differ sharply: some hold that the words themselves were given, some that the writers were guided while writing in their own idiom, some that inspiration attaches to the message rather than the wording, and some that the Bible becomes God's word to the reader in the act of encounter rather than being it as a property.

2. 2

   Explain the literal sense of scripture.

   Model answer

   It is what the words say in their plain meaning and what the author can be taken to have intended, including the ordinary force of metaphor and poetry. Classical Christian interpreters regarded it as the foundation on which other senses must rest. It should be distinguished from modern literalism, which additionally insists that every narrative statement is historically and scientifically accurate.

3. 3

   What is the allegorical sense, and where did it come from?

   Model answer

   It is the reading of a text as pointing beyond its surface to a further truth, typically about Christ or about God's dealings with the world, so that an event in Israel's history is read as a figure of something later. The method was already used on Greek myth by philosophers and on scripture by Jewish interpreters in Alexandria before Christian writers took it up, and it allowed difficult or apparently trivial passages to be read profitably.

4. 4

   What is the moral sense of scripture?

   Model answer

   It is the reading of a passage for what it teaches about how to live, treating the text as a guide to conduct and character rather than only as information about the past or about doctrine. In the medieval scheme it was one of several senses read alongside the literal, together with a further sense concerning the believer's final destiny. Its risk is that it can reduce narrative to moral example.

5. 5

   What did Barth mean by calling scripture the Word of God?

   Model answer

   Barth distinguished the Word revealed in Jesus Christ, the Word written in scripture, and the Word proclaimed in preaching, holding that the second and third are the Word of God because they bear witness to the first. On his account the Bible is a human document, fully open to critical study, which nevertheless becomes God's address when God chooses to speak through it. He therefore refused both the liberal reduction of scripture to religious experience and the identification of it with an inerrant text.

6. 6

   What did Bultmann mean by demythologising, and what did he not mean?

   Model answer

   He observed that the New Testament speaks within a picture of the world that includes a heaven above, an underworld below, and events caused by spirits and demons, and he argued that modern people cannot be asked to adopt that picture as the price of faith. Demythologising is the work of interpreting that language for what it says about human existence before God. He explicitly did not mean deleting the mythological material or reducing the message to ethics: he was a preacher who wanted the proclamation to be heard, and he held that stripping the myth away without interpreting it would lose the message.

Other ways to work this

The same content, four other ways.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.