Using the Bible - Words to Live By: Love Art Print

Words to Live By: Love Art Print
DeWitt, Debbie
Buy at AllPosters.com


How can I use the Bible so that it will speak to me in this way? Let us look at some of the ways in which Christians have tried to answer this question.

1. One method which people have used since very early times, particularly with difficult passages, has been to interpret the Bible allegorically. An allegory is a story that has hidden meanings which do not appear on the surface. If I write, for example, "The raccoon had a splinter in its paw until it got to the riverbank," this may be my allegorical way of saying that the Christian (raccoon) is involved in sin (splinter) until he has been baptized (riverbank), and I may be seriously trying to write about Christian faith in the form of an allegory about animals.

Many of the Early Church Fathers interpreted portions of the Bible in this fashion. Take Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan, a story illustrating what it means to be a good neighbor (look it up in Luke 10: 25-37 if you've forgotten how it goes). Augustine made an allegory out of the story, giving every detail a hidden significance. "A certain man" was Adam. Jerusalem was the heavenly city. The robbers were the devil and his angels. The Samaritan was Jesus himself. The inn was the Church. The innkeeper was the apostle Paul. And so on. The story of the Good Samaritan was transformed from a tale about true neighborliness into an allegory of the whole Christian drama of salvation.

Since religious language must always make use of imagery, the method of allegorical interpretation can sometimes serve a useful function. The danger is that one who is not a scholar and expert can "twist" a story to mean whatever he wants it to mean, and not only may the real point of the story be lost, but utterly false meanings may be "read in."

2. In sharp contrast to the allegorical method is the view that the Bible is to be interpreted literally, often with the further claim that since every word is directly inspired, all parts are therefore of equal profit and value. This is a much newer way of interpreting the Bible than the allegorical way. Luther, for example, the first Protestant Reformer, made sharp distinctions between various parts of the Bible, calling James an "epistle of straw," and stating that he saw little religious value in the book of Revelation. Whether his judgments were correct is not so important, for the moment, as the fact that he felt free to make them. But later Reformers, having continued with Luther to repudiate the absolute authority of the pope, turned more and more to a belief in the absolute authority of the Scriptures, interpreted in such a way that to be a Christian meant believing the words of the Bible, the statements contained within the covers of the book, as literally true in all particulars. In what way did this raise a problem?

For one thing, it is true that religious language must resort to symbolism, imagery, and poetic description on certain occasions, and such use of language loses its religious significance if taken literally. When Jesus told us to be as little children, for example, he didn't mean that we were supposed to wear diapers.