Good Interpretation

As I have been ministering on campus with InterVarsity for roughly a year and half now, I have fallen more deeply in love with the Bible.   I have been spending much time in the gospels with my students, and before this, I had spent the past few years reading through all the narrative portions of the Old Testament, as well as spending a lot of time in Psalms.  It is also important to mention that I grew up on a steady diet of scripture from a very young age (I have my mother to thank for this).  This has resulted in a pretty decent accrual of scriptural knowledge up to this point.  One of the most exhilarating things about all this has been that I am constantly seeing more continuity in the Word than I have ever seen before.  The Bible is continually making more sense to me, not less.  If you have not read it, or have not been spending much time in it recently, I plead with you to do so!  I am convinced that this is the most amazing work of literature in the world!

That said, I read portions of  a book recently that has confirmed a lot of what I have been learning about the study to scripture, and I wanted to share a few paragraphs of it with all of you teachers, preachers, and passionate studiers out there.  The book is called How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart.  This is an excerpt from Chapter 1:

We agree that Christians should learn to read, believe, and obey the Bible.  And we especially agree that the Bible need not be an obscure book if studied and read properly.  In fact, we are convinced that the single most serious problem people have with the Bible is not with a lakc of understanding, but with the fact that they understand most things too well!  For example, with such a text as "Do everything without grumbling or arguing." (Phil 2:14), the problem is not understanding it but obeying it - putting it in to practice.

We also agree that the preacher or teacher is all too often prone to dig first and look later, and thereby cover up the plain meaning of the text, which often lies on the surface.  Let it be said at the outset - and repeated throughout - the aim of good interpretation is not uniqueness; one is not trying to discover what no one else has ever seen before.

Interpretation that aims at, or thrives on, uniqueness can usually be attributed to pride (an attempt to "outclever" the rest of the world), a false understanding of spirituality (wherein the Bible is full of deeply buried truths waiting to be mined by the spiritually sensitive person with special insight). or vested interests (the need to support a theological bias, especially in dealing with texts that seem to go against that bias).  Unique interpretations are usually wrong.  This is not to say that the correct understanding of a text may not seem unique to to someone who hears it for the first time.  But it is to say the uniqueness is not the aim of our task.

The aim of good interpretation is simple:  to get at the "plain mean meaning of the text."  And the most important ingredient one brings to this task is enlightened common sense.  The test of good interpretation is that it makes good sense of the text.  Correct interpretation, therefore, brings relief to the mind as well as a prick or prod to the heart.