Why Good Interpretation Doesn’t Always Feel Practical—And Why That’s Okay
I am currently working on a couple projects to restart the blog but I had a thought today that I thought would be really helpful for people to think through but also for me to process as well:
Why do I spend so much time on the little details of the Bible?
I have had a few conversations this summer some that have left me with this question on my mind. Most of them centered around something like: “Well what does this practically mean for me?” or “So how should this affect the daily life of the church?”
The honest answer: It probably doesn’t change anything…for you.
I think there are two things that need to be addressed with this question.
First, the scriptures are not just about you, nor were they written to you. One of the first principles we must embrace for good interpretation of the Bible is that the scriptures were written to people who don’t live in the time period I live in. The texts were written to people almost 2,000 years ago (or more)! The Bible is not your “How-To Manual.” The plain truth is the Bible is not tailor-made for you. But this brings me to a better question we can ask ourselves, what does this mean for someone else?
While not every text means something for me, it can affect how someone else lives their Christian walk. Texts about raising children well aren’t going to have meaning for people who are without children. Texts about persecution aren’t going to have meaning for people who aren’t being persecuted (and it would be really bad if we started labeling things persecution which aren’t persecution for the sake of making a text meaningful to us!) By reading these texts in their context and understanding the suffering which those people were going through, we can learn about suffering without co-opting these texts for ourselves.
I think one of the most helpful places that thinking about how a text might have meanings for someone else is in how I talk to non-Christians about the Bible. Often times when talking to someone who is antagonist to the Christian faith, I find that they have constructed their argument around a Bible passage that I don’t actually agree with their interpretation of. I will often start to walk them through the culture of the ancient world and seek to ground them in a scholarly understanding of the text. This often makes them see it from a different perspective and creates a least combative conversation. By thinking through the Bible well with people (even if its about a Law in Leviticus that we don’t hold to as Christians), I can move a conversation into a more productive space for both of us.
The other thing that I should address in this is pragmatism. Pragmatism is defined by Oxford as “an approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application.” Take a moment and google “pragmatism and the church” and you will find article after article talking about how we do church pragmatically and why that’s a bad thing. I think this is a topic that is really important conversation to be had.
We need to ask ourselves: is theology and preaching only of value if it is relevant?
One of my favorite conversations on this has to do with worship in the church called Scripture-Guided Worship : A Call to Pastors and Worship Leaders by Joseph Crider. I think this is a great conversation that needs to be explored further in relationship with Biblical Interpretation but I think that we need to be careful when asking “What can this text do for me?”
I think by shifting our mindset away from this, especially if we can shift towards thinking about how this text speaks to someone else, we will actually live out scripture by not just thinking about our own interests but also the interests of others (Philippians 2.4).
Trent Hipp 