Contextual Interpretation

Improved Essays
When thinking about the nature of the Bible in terms of authoritative, inerrant, or divinely inspired, I personally find the Bible to be authoritative. At the beginning of this course I thought that the Bible had to be inerrant in order to be true. If the Bible were to be considered inerrant it would mean that the bible is without error in every aspect. This cannot be true though because some of the scientific and historical claims within in the Bible have been proven to be inaccurate. Therefore, I cannot find the idea of the Bible being inerrant to be a true statement. Another theory to take into account is the idea that the Bible is divinely inspired. This concept means that the text is in some way from God, literally “God Breathed”, but …show more content…
There are three types of interpretive methods. The first of these interpretive methods is historical. When interpreting the Bible historically one is looking at the world in which the text was written, and what the authors or editors originally wanted the Bible to say. Another of the three methods of interpretation is literary. Literary interpretation analyzes the text from a literary standpoint. One who is interpreting the text in this way would look at literary devices, and theological presuppositions within the Bible. The last method of interpretation that one may use when reading the Bible is contextual. A contextual interpretation takes into account the readers environment, biases, and other things that effect how the reader sees the text. Contextual interpretation is most imperative for how someone may use the word of God in everyday life. It is an interpretation that helps the reader use the Bible in modern …show more content…
These three interpretations are: analytical, theological, and personal. Analytical interpretation is the choices a reader makes about reading the text. These choices could be what specific book or verse of the Bible the reader chooses, the methods of reading the selected passage, or the questions the reader may present after reading the passage. The second interpretation listed, theological, means the categories of thought that define the range of meaning a reader can find within the text. The last interpretation being personal interpretation is one where the reader brings his or her own experiences and biases to the text and what use they hope to get out of

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Walter Brueggemann essay’s Biblical authority Considered one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last several decades, Walter Brueggemann is the author of several books and publications, but our main focus is on the six facets of biblical interpretation he develops and considers crucial. The first facet he talked about was Inherency which describes the fact that people are all equal at church because they share the same engagement and energy concerning the truth said in the Bible. Also, each and every reader should be able to use his or her faith in order to make the difference between good news and lesser claims.…

    • 908 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I was completely unaware of such a huge detail. Sumney does a great job of laying out the different formats of the bible as it relates to different religions and languages as well as explaining how the bible came to be. One interesting note that I found regards chapter three about Inspiration. Sumney explains that, “the Bible is inspired because it is through these texts that God has chosen to be with them, and it is through these texts that they learn how to enter the relationship with God that their forebears had” (Sumney 43). This brings several questions to mind.…

    • 716 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The effects of misinterpretation affect the ways we as human perceive each other, we use the biblical text to judge one another by thinking the text is a manual to build our lives on, but we fail to acknowledged that we should not use modern interpretation on an ancient text like the bible or historical text of the earlier…

    • 1222 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In our view, biblical interpretation succeeds, first, when it enables modern readers to understand the meaning of the original biblical texts-the meaning the people at the time the texts’ composition (author, editor, audience, readers) would have most likely understood-and only then seeks its significance for Christians…

    • 504 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Bible is arguably the most influential book of all time. It has been attributed with impacting the lives of untold millions of people and has been claimed as the impetus behind many of the Western World’s upheavals. Martin Luther’s thesis was founded on the book; pilgrims set sail to find a place where they could follow their own interpretations of it. Missionaries travel the world bringing its words, along with the culture of those missionaries to the most remote corners of civilization, for better or for worse. Rumors about the book abound.…

    • 1396 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mercer's Argument Analysis

    • 1000 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Some Christians and students of the Bible take a contextualist view of inerrancy by asserting that the text was divinely inspired by God, yet the authors added their own personal style and voice by writing in the context of their own experiences. Others subscribe to the literalist view of inerrancy, which asserts that the Bible is flawless and every single word written was given to the authors by God, leaving no room for personal flair. The inerrancy of the Bible lies in its divine message, but because the Bible was written by human authors, there may be small discrepancies in certain aspects such as chronology. One of the most important things to realize is that the Bible contains philosophy, history, and science, but was never meant to be considered a textbook. Those who critique the Bible on its accuracy in these subjects miss the point of the Bible as a whole.…

    • 1000 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Now more than ever, the world is more closely connected through the nearly-instantaneous exchange of ideas and information. This exchange of ideas means that collaboration for the advancement of knowledge on a particular subject is possible and facilitates advancements in that field. On the other hand, having access to the abundance of contrasting ideas also means that people have more to think about and more they can argue about. One of said arguments is whether the Bible is really trustworthy. There are too many different beliefs about the Bible to list them all, but some of the main ones are that the Bible is the word of God and true and trustworthy, the Bible is just a book written by man and, therefore, vulnerable to the weaknesses of any human-written work and fallible, or that the Bible is mostly true but has some inaccuracies, thus casting doubt as to whether it is inspired by God.…

    • 1064 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    We have more than five thousand manuscripts handwritten copies of the New Testament. Many very early and some of them in a few decades of when they were written which is by far early than any ancient works of literature. A few of the New Testament books were written on parchment and rolled into scrolls. However, the church soon began using paper made from papyrus reeds grown in swampy areas (Towns, pg. 20). The amount of evidence that we have to compare to other ancient works is one of the things that is called data it's hard evidence I don’t think no one ever disagree with that.…

    • 488 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Exodus, Daniel 6, And Job

    • 1509 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Throughout history the themes and notions of the Bible have been controversial. Even today, the books of the Old Testament are up for debate, as to whether they are relevant, irrelevant, or offensive to people. Different individuals, however, seem to have different views to the passages, regardless of their religious affiliation. Due to the different views posed by contemporary people, the biblical passages tend to relate to matters based on religious views or secular views. The three passages, Exodus, Daniel 6, and Job depict the relevance of the Bible today through the religious and secular views uncovered.…

    • 1509 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Man He Killed Explication

    • 1002 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Each line is looked at on its own to determine the overall meaning. An analysis is when one look at a work compared to a literary element. For example, if a story includes an extended metaphor, a person can use this to help explain how it affects the meaning of the story. An interpretation is explaining what one, the writer, believe the story’s meaning is. Evidence from throughout the whole story should be used to support it.…

    • 1002 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    It is what makes the my previous thoughts that much more interesting in my mind. How does one come to a conclusion on what is what? Through hermeneutics and exegesis it possible to keep growing in the skill of interpretation, but when does it become less about the authority of Scripture and more about your thought process and attitude towards the scripture? I feel like, the more you do it, the better you become at it.…

    • 508 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Through this, one can base their faith and spirituality on their readings and interpretations. On the contrary, one can have a further better understanding of Christianity if one hears and orally interprets the Bible. After the pastor’s sermon, the audience is left with notable teaching that will become the foundation and the building blocks for the social ethics of the Christian community (Coward 40). In Scriptures of the World’s Religion, Fieser points out that all the Gospels contain the stories, messages, and accounts of Jesus; the Gospels are considered the most primary text for the New Testament canon for all Christian texts (Fieser 350). Within in the four Gospels of the New Testament, fundamental orality is exhibited in many various ways.…

    • 421 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In second place, symbolic interpretive perspectives describe how people give meaning to their experience in a specific context, for example their history. Symbolic-interpretive believes in the fact that certain people can be pushed to succeed by rewards and recognition. The interpretive symbolic, however, has limitations because there is no way of knowing if an employee is doing his job well if no one is there to check his work performance. To finish, Postmodernism, born in 1920, is a cultural and intellectual phenomenon. It comes after modernism and therefore denotes a refusal of the current socio-economic climate.…

    • 814 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Bible is the historically accurate, Holy Spirit inspired, and inerrant word of God. Because the Bible is the inerrant word of God, its’ contents are to be believed and followed. God’s word shows that man and woman were made to complement each other and that homosexual relations are sinful. Content…

    • 1060 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    1.Definition of Ambiguity Ambiguity, as is defines in the Webster’s Third International Dictionary, is”the condition of admitting of two or more meanings, of being understood in more than one way, or of referring to two of more things at the same time.” In ordinary books on linguistics, the term is generally defined roughly as a linguistic phenomenon that a word, phrase or clause can have more than one possible interpretation. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted (although some may not be immediately obvious), whereas with information that is vague,…

    • 1876 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays