Hermeneutics Quotes

“فكرة الحداثة والعلمانية والتنوير فكرة متأخرة عن الثورة العلمية بقرنيين على الأقل وهي نتيجة الثورة العلمية ومعلولهاوليست شرطها وعلتها”
― أبو يعرب المرزوقي, صونًا للفلسفة والدين

“All apostles were disciples. Not all disciples were apostles. Disciples (Greek: mathetes) were pupils, hence, followers. Apostles (Greek: apostolos) were ambassadors, hence, leaders.”
― James Allen Moseley, Biographies of Jesus' Apostles: Ambassadors in Chains

“Jerome says Peter founded the church in Antioch, Syria. If so, January 15–22, AD 34 was probably the time when Peter did it.”
― James Allen Moseley, Biographies of Jesus' Apostles: Ambassadors in Chains

“I am an ambassador in chains,” wrote Paul in Ephesians 6:20.”
― James Allen Moseley, Biographies of Jesus' Apostles: Ambassadors in Chains

“أسمع من المحيط إلى الخليج أن من لا يقدر على إفهامنا لم تحل معادلات الدرجة الثانية بالطريقة التي تحل بها يخرف حول ابستمولوجية السقوط الحر ونسبية اينشتاين خلطا بين التعليقات الإيديولوجية والنفسية على مايزعم جاريا في وعي العلماء وتصوراتهم وبين فهم آليات الإبداع العلمي وقوانينه”
― أبو يعرب المرزوقي, صونًا للفلسفة والدين

“Historical exegesis is only the preliminary part of interpretation; application is its essence. Exegesis without application should not be called interpretation at all.”
― J.I. Packer

“When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded work (like manhood, womanhood, politics, economics, marriage, and even equality), we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don't fit our tastes. In an attempt to simplify, we try to force the Bible's cacophony of voices into a single tone, to turn a complicated and at times troubling holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“Pastors and Bible teachers go about their work in communal settings, where they listen to as well as deliver sermons, hear as well as speak, and gain biblical insights from their parishioners as much as they pass them on.”
― Peter J. Leithart, Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture

“By the time the book of Lamentations was finished, God had divided it’s pages into five different mindsets: 1) “Judah, Minus Jehovah”—within 22 verses. 2) “Her Faithless Offspring”—within 22 verses. 3) “Jesus Whispering Beneath the Text”—within 66 verses. 4) “This is How!”—within 22 verses. 5) “Why Go Back?”—within 22 verses. There are so many mathematical symmetries I don’t have enough pages to elaborate.
Lamentations, pg 2”
― Michael Ben Zehabe, Lamentations: how narcissistic leaders torment church and family

“The irrational bias of the myth of progress can be seen in the tendency to criticize orthodox church fathers for reading Greek metaphysics into the text, while overlooking Baruch Spinoza's rationalism and Bruno Bauer's Hegelianism on their own biblical interpretation. Is this because "Greek" metaphysics is bad, but "German" metaphysics is good? According to the history of hermeneutics as told from an Enlightenment perspective, if it were not for the pagan Enlightenment, Christians would still be reading Greek metaphysics into the Bible like Augustine and making it say whatever they pleased like Origen. Is it not rather bizarre that this narrative asks us to believe that it took the pagan Epicureanism of the Enlightenment to rescue us from the "subjectivism" of the Nicene fathers, medieval schoolmen, and Protestant Reformers?”
― Craig A. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis

“For believers to "follow Jesus" implies, among other things, adopting the same attitude towards God's Word as Jesus had. Becoming like Christ involves accepting his example as one who reads the Bible. It means defining ourselves and our purpose in life in light of the Bible. Following Christ also means practicing what the Bible says. Simply put, we cannot truthfully say that we are followers of Jesus if we neglect or refuse to obey what the Bible tells us, or if we use it in self-serving ways that are not what God originally intended.”
― Ray Lubeck, Read the Bible for a Change: Understanding and Responding to God's Word

“Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only “mouth honour” and that decreasingly. . . It is, if you like to put it that way, not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite, it excludes or repels, the merely aesthetic approach. You can read it as literature only by a tour de force. You are cutting the wood against the grain, using the tool for a purpose it was not intended to serve. It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very long except to those who go to it for something quite different.”
― C.S. Lewis, Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian

“Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“It is again fortunate from this point of view that the old symbolists who gave us the things which they classified as veils of allegory and the imagery of the High Grades left, as I have said, no key to their real meaning. The reason is that their personal understanding—supposing it to have emerged clearly—would no doubt have been of consequence in their own day but without appeal in ours, and yet we should be bound thereto. As it is, the field is free before us within the measures offered by the veils, their metaphysical matter and texture. The dead school of Masonry will continue while it lasts to affirm that there is nothing behind them, but the dead school will pass and give place to a living Masonry, which is already in the world and is breathing its own spirit into the outward forms.”
― Arthur Edward Waite, The Lost Word Its Hidden Meaning: A Correlation of the Allegory and Symbolism of the Bible with That of Freemasonry and an Exposition of the Secret Doctrine

“The real meaning of historical materialism, and at the same time, the most important advance of the philosophy of history since the romantic movement, consists rather in the insight that historical developments have their origin not in formal principles, ideas and entities, not in substances which unfold and produce in the course of history mere ‘modifications’ of their fundamentally unhistorical nature, but in the fact that historical development represents a dialectical process, in which every factor is in a state of motion and subject to constant change of meaning, in which there is nothing static, nothing timelessly valid, but also nothing one-sidedly active, and in which all factors, material and intellectual, economic and ideological, are bound up together in a state of indissoluble interdependence, that is to say, that we are not in the least able to go back to any point in time, where a historically definable situation is not already the result of this interaction. Even the most primitive economy is already an organized economy, which does not, however, alter the fact that, in our analysis of it, we must start with the material preconditions, which, in contrast to the forms of intellectual organization, are independent and comprehensible in themselves.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scriptures. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out.”
― Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration

“...no theory of hermeneutic legitimation can be indeed legitimate if not by the process of hermeneutic reading… At the origin of the hermeneutic practice, there is a circle; it does not matter how holy or how vicious.”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“All texts are, always, to various degrees, contradictory, multifarious, polysemic. This is not license for epistemological anarchy, according to which anything, any reading, always goes. But it is to acknowledge that no next, whatever its author's (or reader's) intent, can have a simple, singular meaning. Every text will generate something like a tangle of meanings and connotations, more or less concentrated around a core, more or less protean or stable, according to political, social and linguistic context. As one playful formulation has it, rather than being straightforwardly 'about' something in particular, every text is inevitably surrounded by a 'vibrating aboutness cluster'. The context, content and range of that cluster must be accounted for as part of an analysis. Some writers in some situations may strain against rhetorical shenanigans, for example striving for the specificity of logical notation: the cluster of reasonable meanings of such texts may well thus be less diffuse than for those which, say, revel in pun and performance. But a text with one 'true' meaning is a chimera. Analysis is not closure, but an attempt to discern reasonable meaning(s) close to the core of that cluster, and to contest those that range too far from it.”
― China Miéville

“With regard to the gospels, biblical scholarship has mixed-up theology with history, thereby turning the eschatology of the epistles into memoirs.”
― Eli Of Kittim, The Little Book of Revelation: The First Coming of Jesus at the End of Days

“Most Bible-readers of a conservative stamp will look askance at deconstructionism. But its proposed model is in fact too close for comfort to many models implicitly adopted within (broadly speaking) the pietist tradition. The church has actually institutionalized and systematized ways of reading the Bible which are strangely similar to some strands of postmodernism. In particular, the church has lived with the gospels virtually all its life, and familiarity has bred a variety of more or less contemptible hermeneutical models. Even sometimes within those circles that claim to take the Bible most seriously—often, in fact, there above all—there is a woeful refusal to do precisely that, particularly with the gospels. The modes of reading and interpretation that have been followed are, in fact, functions of the models of inspiration and authority of scripture that have been held, explicitly or (more often) implicitly within various circles, and which have often made nonsense of any attempt to read the Bible historically. The devout predecessor of deconstructionism is that reading of the text which insists that what the Bible says to me, now, is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelists, the life of the early church, or even about what Jesus was actually like. There are some strange bedfellow in the world of literary epistemology.”
― N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

“As a result of overly reactive posturing toward an unbelieving world we sometimes breed our own worst understandings of the Bible.”
― William J Webb

“Scriptura Scripturae interpres - Scripture is the interpreter of Scripture...

-Karl Barth, Gifford Lectures (1930)
quoted in Webster, Barth's Earlier Theology, 108”
― David I. Starling, Hermeneutics as Apprenticeship: How the Bible Shapes Our Interpretive Habits and Practices

“Je kunt niet zomaar iets uit een vers halen, zonder eerst de context te bepalen.
(Dutch for: You can't easily get something from a verse, without determining it's context first)”
― Simeon Visscher

“The ideal interpreter should be one who has entered into that strange first-century world, has felt its whole strangeness, has sojourned in it until he has lived himself into it, thinking and feeling as one of those to whom the Gospel first came, and who will then return into our world, and give to the truth he has discovered a body out of the stuff of our own thought.

-- The Present Task in New Testament Studies”
― Charles Harold Dodd

“A little self-doubt will do no harm and may do a great deal of good: we will be more open to learn and correct our mistakes. But too much will shackle and stifle us with deep insecurities and make us so much aware of methods that we may overlook truth itself.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“Good question. You have studied your history, and you know that slaves were property, not human beings, so they were objects instead of subjects to the government. To view another human being as property—objects instead of human beings—would not be biblical, because a slavemaster would kind of be acting like God–ruling over others and trying to use them for their own desires. That is not right, because the Bible says that no one is like God, and they shouldn’t act like a God over other people, because there is only one God, as one of the Ten Commandments mentioned.

“Also, even if human beings were allowed to act like God, the way those types of people rule over their slaves is unbiblical, because they do not follow the commandments about love. The New Testament says that we should love, forgive, and help others the same way Jesus did, but if people are going to objectify each other and view each other as property, slave masters' intentions to love, forgive, and help others would be reduced, if not unfulfilled.

“You also mentioned the New Testament’s commandments. You are correct, there are verses about slaves. Titus 2:9-10 says, ‘Slaves must always obey their masters and do their best to please them. They must not talk back or steal, but must show themselves to be entirely trustworthy and good. Then they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive in every way.’ By law, a slave would have to obedient to his or her master, so Paul was sent to show that God acknowledges the existence of this law, but even though this law was used, notice how slaves are required to not argue and steal, and they are required to be trustworthy. Those are values that were taught to freed believers! Titus 3:9 talks about preventing quarrels, Exodus 20:15 literally says, “Do not steal,” and Proverbs 11:13 condemns slanderers and praises trustworthy people, so even though slaves were still expected to follow the law, they, like other believers, had the opportunity to uphold biblical values and become strong Christians. Colossians 4:1 also says, ‘Masters, be just and fair to your slaves. Remember that you also have a Master—in heaven.’ This verse actually ensures the welfares of slaves. The laws that the government enforced at that time probably did spread the notion that slaves are property, and so, by law, slaves were still property, but by Christ, they were quite equal to the status of a freed believer. Their was care for slaves’ welfares, which, under Christ, raised them to a greater status than just property. They were property by law, but children of Christ through God.”
― Lucy Carter, The Reformation

“The early church had much more than a collection of social practices upon which they did not reflect carefully. The early church ethics were formed in the context of a Judaism that had thought long and hard about its ethic based on Mosaic law, over against the practices of surrounding cultures. The early church's ethics were a further reflection on how that long history of Jewish ethics had to be rethought in light of Jesus Christ. Rethinking the faith involved an interpretation of authoritative Scripture and a continued use of the Law in ethical matters.”
― Rollin G. Grams & S. Donald Fortson III

“[B]iblical criticism could first develop only within the Protestant world, yet not without bitter acrimony and further cross-sectional divisions among Protestants into liberal, conservative or evangelical, and fundamentalist camps.”
― Theodore G. Stylianopoulos, The New Testament: An Orthodox Perspective, Vol. 1: Scripture, Tradition, Hermeneutics

“Seldom do we embrace a new idea, especially one of a religious nature.”
― Eli Of Kittim, The Little Book of Revelation: The First Coming of Jesus at the End of Days