7: The Philosophy of Bible Interpretation

(00:01) Stephanie Warner: Season 4, Episode 7. Hello, Father.

(00:06) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter

(00:08) Stephanie Warner: Good to see you. We just got back from a fun event. We just got back from the Hope Together Conference, which was pretty epic. Man, Jennie Allen and Nona Jones and Christine Caine. All this, wow. And then not to mention …

(00:24) Marcus Warner: Yeah, they had secondary guys like George Barna, right?

(00:27) Stephanie Warner: Oh man, and then you know, Marcus Warner.

(00:34) Marcus Warner: Yeah, I think he did a workshop or two, but yeah.

(00:36) Stephanie Warner: Oh my goodness, that was so good. It was so good to see so many people in person and guess what? Guess what’s happening this week?

(00:47) Marcus Warner: Uh, what is happening this week?

(00:50) Stephanie Warner: Spirit and Scripture Course releases!

(00:53) Marcus Warner: Wow, that’s awesome! !

(00:54) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, I know, right? We are so close, and we’ve been hyping this to ourselves and hopefully to you a little bit for a while now. We’re so excited for the next installment of our Heart-Focused Discipleship F.I.S.H. courses, our self-paced courses.

So if you’re a Monday listener, you can still slip in on the pre-order price. But whenever you’re listening to it, hey, it’s available. We’re so excited. Dad, do you want to give just a little peek of what is the Spirit and Scripture Course?

(01:30) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so you know the whole idea behind the F.I.S.H. courses is to lay the foundation that the gospel lays for how to live a victorious Christian life. You know, how to walk in freedom, how to build your life on the foundation of our identity in Christ. And “S” course is about how we walk in the Spirit. And walking in the Spirit has two wings to it. There’s Scripture and there’s relational connection with the Spirit.

And so we’re going to cover both of those things. How do I approach the Scripture, how can I have the most solid foundation possible that way? And how can I learn practical ways of learning to listen to God, recognize his voice, sense his leading in my life, and just experience what you might call a deeper walk with God. So it’s pretty good. I think it’s one of the core courses that I think is going to be something that people will listen to again and again.

(02:27) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It’s really, it’s a one-two punch Spirit and Scripture, and it’s so good. Well, speaking of timely things, I’m doing a quick announcement also that if you want to come to the Deeper Walk Experience in Chicago at the end of this month — the hotel room blocks — the deadline to get in on the hotel discount is October 10th, so here’s your little push.

Come see us in Chicago. Get your hotel room booked if you’re an out-of-towner. And we are looking forward to seeing you there. Links to all these things in the description. All right, Father, guess what again?

(03:09) Marcus Warner: You got me.

(03:11) Stephanie Warner: We made it through the Bible study checklist. We’re ready for interpretation this week. I mean, really, it’s robust. Like you said before, the observation really is just like the bulk of things. Like you’re observing all these things and then you start asking the questions and putting things together.

So yes, so today we are ready to talk more about interpretation in our Bible study series. If I didn’t say that, if somebody just happens to be popping in for the first time, like, what are these crazy people doing? Yes, it’s Bible study. So, Father, would you give us a little intro?

(03:49) Marcus Warner: Sure. So we talk about three steps in the process, and that’s observation, interpretation, and application. Interpretation starts with the letter “I”, which immediately clues you into where this is probably going, that we have three other words that start with the letter I to help us understand what the interpretive process is all about.

(04:15) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, like the philosophies, the philosophies of interpretation.

(04:17) Marcus Warner: They’re kind of philosophical lenses that help us look at the text and begin to interpret it. There’s a lot of elements that go into interpretation. I would just say in general that translation and interpretation are intimately connected.

You can’t really separate them because both things are trying to understand what the author is saying here and put it into a form that people can understand like, okay, this is what the author is trying to say.

(04:48) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, that’s really important. And we did cover that, if you want to go deeper into that little topic, we covered that in an earlier episode of the season series. Both of those things are true.

Yeah, so interpretation — once we have our observations — they need to be interpreted. so that observation could be, as you say, the text itself and how you’re choosing to translate it into another language, but interpretation relies on our perspective. Would you talk more about how our beliefs affect our approach to interpretation?

(05:31) Marcus Warner: Well, you know, in terms of the lenses, are you talking specifically of like the …

(05:36) Stephanie Warner: Sure, we can just go into lenses too if you want to answer it through the lenses.

(05:40) Marcus Warner: Well, you know, our belief — because again, what I believe about my worldview will affect the way that I view Scripture. I saw a documentary — I don’t know if that’s the right word — it was a kind of a docu series, though, where a host had people from a variety of worldviews talking together about what they saw when they read the Bible. So I remember one was a Marxist. One was a Muslim. One was a Hindu. One was a very mainstream liberal Christian. One was an evangelical Christian.

And so if you’re starting with the worldview, that drastic of a difference in your worldviews, that belief system is going to affect what you see and the interpretations honestly that you’re even open to when it comes to what Scripture is saying. So that’s why belief is so important.

(06:40) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, good intro. Well, let’s dig into lens number one, which is intention. Now, we have already talked about taking aim on the text. What is the author’s intended message? But would you recap that for us, the lens of intent.

(06:57) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so one of the key concepts I learned in seminary as I was learning biblical studies was the idea that too many people use the text as a window to the event behind it. So, for example, maybe you’re studying the parting of the Red Sea. And so what you do is you’re reading everything about this, but in your mind, you’re recreating the event. You’re trying to figure out where did this happen, how did it happen, what was it looking like.

And then you listen to people preach on it. And too often what they’re doing is they’re preaching the event behind the text instead of actually preaching the text. And so the question is, well, the author didn’t tell us an awful lot of things about the parting of the Red Sea. It’s not stated specifically, you know, the things that we want to know, to the extent that today there’s even a debate as to which branch of the Red Sea they were crossing.

And I think that what that does is it reminds us that our primary thing that we are looking at is not the event behind the text, it’s the text itself. Because it’s the text itself that shows us what the author wanted us to know about the event, what the author wants us to take away from it.

And so we have to keep that in the forefront of our thinking here that it gets really easy to — it’s also easy to start with — what is it I want to know and then go looking for it in the text instead of asking what is the author trying to say.

So I was actually just listening to N.T. Wright a little bit ago. You walked in and saw the N.T. Wright video on. And one of the things that he was saying was that part of what happened in the Reformation was that people were asking a question and that is, how can I know for sure that I’m going to heaven when I die? How can I avoid going to purgatory or worse?

And so in asking that question they went to the text. And sometimes what that does is it creates a filter because now you think that’s what the author is talking about when you get to certain passages, and it may or may not be what the author is actually talking about. So we do have to kind of make sure that we are letting the author speak for himself, by not saying I’m here to find out more about the history behind it or I am here to get my questions answered.

Now, let me just point out, it’s not wrong to do those two things. We have to get our questions answered. It’s good to know the event behind it, but that is different than finding the author’s intended message.

(09:28) Stephanie Warner: That’s good. I wanted to bring us back there too and I was like, let’s zoom out and take a look at the lens that we’re wearing as we are even talking about this right now, which is, I’m almost reminded as a tangent of how we use breakthrough and the five engines of our emotions that you can have a breakthrough in different areas.

You’re approaching things from different areas. Right now we’re in the literary. We want to know the author’s intended message, right? We want to know what is the author trying to communicate. It’s not that we don’t think it’s historical. It’s not that we don’t think that that history has something to offer us, but the lens that we’re approaching it with is literary. Does that make sense? I don’t know if I …

(10:14) Marcus Warner: It does. Exactly. Because we do want to know the author’s context. Because the author’s context helps us know what they’re saying. For example, it makes a big difference whether the Torah was written by Moses out of an Egyptian context of somebody coming out of Egypt in the 15th century BC, or whether it was written by somebody after the Babylonian exile in Mesopotamia.

The context is going to change a lot of things. And so that’s why those things can be helpful, and they are a part of it. But what we want to know for sure is let’s pay attention to the text and the observations actually come from the text.

(10:59) Stephanie Warner: I could say more on that, but I will keep us pressing along.

(11:03) Marcus Warner: It’s a long, big topic.

(11:05) Stephanie Warner: It’s a big topic and it’s fun. And also, digging into all these different facets is fun. And so it’s okay to have fun and explore things with God. Just what is your intent?

So, I actually, as a means of putting into story context the importance of the author’s intended message, wanted you to share the story of the telegraph. And I don’t even remember exactly where this came from. I don’t know if it’s probably a story with many forms, but the point stands.

(11:46) Marcus Warner: No you can run into this, like there’s memes about, kind of like this on the internet about a variety of things, but it’s essentially the way I heard the story was that this is driving home the importance of even small details in the text, including punctuation and stuff like that.

There was a husband and wife who were very wealthy and think of the robber baron days, you know, of the early 1900s, the Gilded Age, you know. And one of them was back in the states, the husband was back in the states doing business, and the wife was traveling in Italy. And she sent a text, not a text. That would not be appropriate. She sent a telegraph basically asking for permission to buy this beautiful piece of jewelry.

And the husband telegraphed back “No, price too high.” But then she came home with the jewelry and he was like, ‘Wait, I telegraphed you ‘No, price too high,’ and she said,”Exactly, no price too high.” And it’s like just even where you put the punctuation or how you put the emphasis on which part of that, changes the whole message of it.

Was he saying no don’t do it, the price is too high or was he saying, no price too high? So that kind of reinforces this idea that you’ve got to pay attention to the small things to know that the author’s intention does matter.

(13:21) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, when I think on that story too, it was even like the telegraph people had to like pay back the price of the necklace or the jewelry because …

(13:38) Marcus Warner: Actually, yeah, now as you mention it, it’s been a while since I told that story, but I think what happened was the telegraph people forgot the period after the word no. That’s what it was. And so he ended up suing the telegraph company and winning because it changed the whole meaning of the message of the text when they forgot the period.

(13:56) Stephanie Warner: And the author’s intended message is the whole point of the message. It is important. Anyway, no price too high. All right, anything else you want to say about the author’s intended message before we move on to lens number two?

(14:11) Marcus Warner: No, I think it’s good. We can move on to lens two.

(14:17) Marcus Warner: Inerrancy, yeah. And you might go … So people think sometimes that inerrancy makes you narrow-minded, that you, if you come to the text predisposed with the belief that God is behind this and that the text has no errors, that you are now limited in your interpretations. I find it to be almost the other way around.

Obviously, I went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, right? So I’m coming from a strong inerrancy position and the belief that when Jesus said your word is truth, he wasn’t just talking about prophetic words or the messages from prophets. He was talking about the Scriptures, and we can go on and on about the Bible teaching inerrancy. The reason this is important in interpretation, is again that if you don’t believe in inerrancy, then you feel no need to even try to harmonize difficult passages.

In fact, if anything, you are predisposed to find controversy and difficulty even if it isn’t there. And some classic examples of that, like people who don’t believe in inerrancy love to pit Peter against Paul as if they were in some kind of a conflict with each other and as if Paul reinvented the Christianity that Jesus taught and all these things that you’ve really got to search to find in the Bible.

But if you’re committed to inerrancy, then you’re looking for the things that harmonize. And if you’re not, you’re almost going the other direction. You want to find proof and evidence that this doesn’t harmonize.

(16:05) Stephanie Warner: And would you define, just to give a quick definition for what is inerrancy?

(16:12) Marcus Warner: So inerrancy is basically the idea that God is behind the scriptures and because he’s the author of it, you can trust them, and it is correct in everything that it teaches. Now, to take this a step further, this also means that if it’s using poetry, you interpret it poetically. If it’s using apocalyptic, you interpret it apocalyptically. It doesn’t mean that …

(16:39) Stephanie Warner: It’s not saying the interpretation is inerrant. It’s saying the text is inerrant.

(16:42) Marcus Warner: It doesn’t say interpretations are inerrant, and it doesn’t mandate a particular interpretive process. We still have to take genre into account. We still have to take things like this into account.

There’s still some room for debate on things like this, but the idea is that God has left us a reliable witness that we can trust and that is authoritative for the way that we think about and live our lives.

(17:09) Stephanie Warner: So what does approaching interpretation from the lens of inerrancy look like on a practical basis?

(17:17) Marcus Warner: So, you know, one of the examples I give — having studied the Old Testament at an academic level decades ago — I remember being a little bit shocked at the required reading, you know, in Old Testament, because I went into this thinking, I’m going to learn the Bible stories better, and I’m going to learn how to interpret these stories better, and I’m going to see the themes and how they all connect together.

But no, that’s not actually what we studied. It was this theologian invented this hypothesis about how everything connects, and that theologian invented this hypothesis. And you’re looking at stuff and honestly, some of it I felt like was almost insane. It was crazy the stuff that people were coming up with because once you remove inerrancy, your imagination is free to run wild on how you put everything together. And that’s what it felt like. It felt like people were just trying to stretch how far their imagination could go in creating a hypothesis.

A classic example is Moses. And that is, was Moses an actual historical character or was Moses mythological? Does that matter to your interpretation of the text? Well, yes, it does. Because if he’s mythological, then you can read him as someone who was invented years later to bolster up and defend a message that you wanted to make.

And they also create this, I think, artificial contrast between prophets and priests, almost like they’re Democrats and Republicans, that I don’t think, you know, truly existed in those days. It feels like this can be completely read into the text. And so there are things like that that I found that once you lose inerrancy as a lens for looking at Scripture, your imagination takes over.

And there are almost no controls on it. And so we see this in the Jesus Seminar, Historical Jesus and all these other things. And it gets in my mind to be a little bit ridiculous. It’s a little bit ridiculous. I think I use ridiculous, insane, and crazy.

(19:23) Stephanie Warner: We touched a button guys, we touched a button. Yeah, I want to even think about things like miracles and like the supernatural and the Bible and stuff and like there’s just there’s so much. That’s why I went to Asbury Theological Seminary, and I chose that because I wanted to study the Bible and I wanted to study the Bible firstly with somewhere I trusted, believed the Bible was the Bible.

And that’s not to say you don’t engage with or learn what other — there are things that can sharpen you and, you know, you’re like, well, I don’t agree with that, but I hadn’t thought about it from that angle. Let me look at this or whatever. But, you know, just like when people are studying how to spot counterfeit money or whatever, and you have to really know the real thing so you can spot other things that are incorrect.

You can twist something in innumerable amounts of ways, but if you have the real thing as the real thing — so as long as you really know that — I’m probably going off on a tangent again. But does that make sense? Do you need to interpret me?

(20:47) Marcus Warner: Well, yeah, and again, as you pointed out earlier, the inerrancy also means that you’re open to Bible prophecy. So in my mind again, the close-minded people are like, there’s no such thing. You can’t have miraculous here. You can’t have supernatural here.

Therefore, that can’t be the meaning of the text. And so I feel like you actually have a broader scope of what is possible when you believe in the supernatural and you believe that God is communicating to us through history and through this record of history.

(21:20) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm.

(21:22) Marcus Warner: I mean, I had a chance to get a fairly prestigious PhD completely paid for and turned it down because they were not open to even considering the idea that Daniel was an actual person. And I’m like, I don’t want to go through and just debate people on stuff like that. I want to actually study the Bible as a message from God. And so it was a little bit different.

(21:47) Stephanie Warner: Practical. All right, lens number three is inquiry. So to find the author’s inerrant intended meaning, we need to learn to ask good questions. So.

(22:02) Marcus Warner: Yeah, and question number one is why. And so every time you make an observation from the stories checklist, you go, well, why did the author do this? So that’s the first question in any interpretive process you’re looking at, first of all, what do I see in this text? You know, then why is this important and why did the author do this?

Or I might ask the question, why didn’t he do something else? And so the observations that I make need to be interpretive, and “why?” is the core question that I’m asking. The other questions that I would ask beyond that have to do with, is there anything else about the background here that would help me? Because let’s face it, the translation process requires archeology.

You’ve got to do a little archeology before you can translate anything, right? That’s how we know what the words mean. You’ve got to do some digging into the culture and those things to get the nuances of the word. And so there’s a lot of things, questions, that come up after we get started, but the core question is always going to be, so why did the author choose to do it this way and not some?

(23:15) Stephanie Warner: You have your anchor question, and then you just keep asking, pushing in, pushing in until you find your answers. And honestly, I know for me, I can get lost in the weeds sometimes of just like, oh, what about this? What about that? What about this? What about that? And I can just … would you give some wisdom to the Stephanies of the world into how to stay focused in your interpretive process?

(23:38) Marcus Warner: Well, you know, again, one of the things that actually helps keep me focused is I want to be, I want to have my relational brain on as I study the Bible so that I stay relationally connected to God as I go through it. I want to ask all the questions, but I also need some kind of a triage system as to what’s truly important and what can I table for another time.

And a lot of times I find that the questions I really want to track down are either immense studies that would require going through a thousand word studies from, you know, 800 different passages of scripture, or they are not so core to the interpretive meaning that they’re worth my time right now. So I look at it, there’s a little bit of triage you’re doing of what is essential to understanding this text and what is not.

I will also say this about translation. Your mom, my wife — sometimes it can be frustrating to read something in English, feel like God spoke to you and you got something out of it only to have somebody like me come along and say, well, that’s not really what it means. You know, the Greek says this or the Hebrew says that. and this would have been a better translation. And this is kind of where it’s going.

And it can deflate people like, what’s the point of even reading the English? And I would just say that’s part of what I mean by the triage of it. It isn’t that God didn’t speak to you and didn’t have some kind of a message for you in the English. It’s not that you can’t understand or get anything out of the English.

I do most of my studies with my English Bible open and the Greek and the Hebrew open. So it’s just that there’s a reason why it’s worth some people diving into the scholarship to learn the original languages because it just opens up doors that you can’t open up any other way. But it’s at a secondary level of necessity when it comes to just being a biblically literate person.

(25:47) Stephanie Warner: Mother is always good at asking questions. She is wonderful at pushing in and seeing things from an imaginative perspective.

(25:54) Marcus Warner: Well, and I think, you know, I liked her because I was her favorite Bible teacher.

(25:59) Stephanie Warner: Well she loved — yeah she had so many questions. She always said she had so many questions, and she would ask people and they would just kind of shut her down, and she would ask you and you would answer them and give her, you know, and you weren’t spoon fed and she was like, whoa. So yeah, that was pretty cool.

Well hey, thank you all for being on the trail with us every week and thank you to every donor who equips us to stay here with you and to reach others around the world. It is a privilege to be on the trail with you, and I just love that we get to do it talking Bible right now.

This is so fantastic. So yeah, thank you everybody for being with us. And next episode, we’re going to be wrapping up the series, is the plan, with a look at application. Father, any thoughts about interpretation?

(26:49) Marcus Warner: Yeah, you know, interpretation is not an easy thing. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be that many commentaries out there. And I think it was Solomon who said of the making of books, there is no end. So don’t be overwhelmed by the fact that there’s no end to Bible study. I look at it this way. It takes just a little bit of effort to get something out of it. And then the more you put into it, there’s more to be had.

And you never get to the point where you say, you know what, I’ve mastered this. I don’t need to go back and do this anymore. You’re never going to get there because there is just so much to unpack, but that depth doesn’t mean that there isn’t something to be had, even by just spending a little bit of time diving into it. So that would be my encouragement. Dive in.

(27:38) Stephanie Warner: Dive in.

Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend. And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer. Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.