We Read the Same Bible: Why Do We Get Such Different Answers?
by H. Darrell Lance

H. Darrell Lance is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Interpretation at Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/ Crozer Theological Seminary, and is editor of The InSpiriter, a quarterly publication of the Association of Welcoming & Affirming Baptists
 

How can people read the same Bible and get such different messages from it?
Back
This is not just a problem between so-called conservatives and liberals: two people may both regard Scripture as the inerrant Word of God and nevertheless come to verbal blows over the interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Two others may hold that the Bible is essentially a human document but still quote favorite passages as "proof texts" in a theological debate. No matter where we locate ourselves on the theological spectrum, we find that we understand and use the Bible in ways that often say more about us than they do about the Bible.
Mental filters  
This raises an acute question for the traditional Baptist tenet that the Bible is our sole authority in matters of faith and practice: Yes, the Bible is the sole and final authority -- but when interpreted by whom? When a simple believer goes to the Bible to find guidance and comfort for his or her soul, the process is far more complex than the act of simply opening a book and reading it. The meaning of Scripture is never transferred from the page to the brain like a fax machine; rather it has to be understood and interpreted by passing through a number of mental filters or lenses of which most people are totally unaware. Let me list some of the most obvious and elementary
  1 - Translator
The typical reader of the Bible, even the scholar, reads it in English or another modern language, not the original Greek or Hebrew. Now anyone who has studied a foreign language, modern or ancient, knows that it is often extraordinarily difficult to convey the meaning of one language in that of another and sometimes quite impossible. As the cliche puts it, "Something gets lost in the translation." Moreover, there are different English translations, and one need only compare the same passage, e.g. Genesis 1:1-3, in three or four different translations to realize there can be wide variations among them.

This is not surprising, because translation itself is already an interpretation. For example, translators must constantly wrestle with passages where the original Greek or Hebrew texts are textually corrupt (i.e. they have obvious textual errors), or which contain obscure words that no amount of scholarly effort has yet fully clarified, or familiar words used in an unusual or ungrammatical way. What is the translator to do in these cases? One cannot simply leave a blank in the text. Nor can one insert a lengthy note to explain the difficulties of the text and all the possible variant meanings (although the better translations will often indicate in a footnote when the translators are making a judgment call). The translators must simply punt; they must make their best guess as to what the text means and offer some English rendering. The conclusion is inescapable: to place our faith in a particular translation is to place our faith in the person or persons who did the translating. An unwary reader, however, may impute equal authority to every passage, unaware of where the ice may be dangerously thin. So the translator is a powerful filter that inevitably influences the reading of the text.

2 - Gender
Another filter is the sex of the reader; the reader obviously is either male or female. Consider the famous passage in Micah 6:4-6: "With what shall I come before the Lord and bow before God on high? Shall I come before him with whole burnt offering? . . . Shall I give the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" As I learned in seminary teaching, a woman student can have quite a different insight into that text than a typical man. So our gender and all the issues that go with gender identity are another filter.

3 - Background and knowledge
Readers have more or less education. One may be untrained in logical thinking or in asking questions and hence never engage the text in an intellectual way. Another may perhaps have little formal education but have the gift of wisdom and profound insight. Another may have a Ph.D. and be highly trained in scientific method but have little inkling of how to read an ancient text. Perhaps one has studied history but not philosophy, psychology but not comparative religion, literary criticism but not anthropology. No one's background and knowledge is exactly like that of anyone else.

4 - Moment in history

  
We live in one particular moment of history. Most white residents of the Deep South in 1848 would have had quite a different understanding of "Bid slaves be submissive to their masters" (Titus 2:9) or "Let those who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor" (I Timothy 6:1) than will their direct descendants of 150 years later.

  

5 - Comfort level with issues of sexuality

  
Discomfort over issues of sexuality -- any kind of sexuality -- is another lens through which we read Scripture. Despite the way in which sex seems to pervade American culture, sociologists tell us that of all Western countries, the only one that is more uncomfortable with issues of sexuality than our own is Ireland. We believe that God created life, our bodies, hands, eyes. But did God really create our genitals? Did Jesus have genitals? The furor a few years ago over the film The Last Temptation of Christ is convincing evidence that many Christians consider it blasphemous even to raise such a question. These cultural attitudes affect powerfully any reading of the Bible on the issue of sexuality in general, let alone the issue of homosexuality.

  

6 - and ...

  
One could list these filters ad infinitum: A woman who was repeatedly raped by her father will feel differently about the word "Father" as applied by Jesus to God than will one who had a loving human father. A conservationist will have a different slant on the Genesis directive to "conquer the earth and subdue it" than will a civil engineer who builds bridges and dams. A happily married couple will read Paul's reluctant view of marriage -- Stay single if you can, but "it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion" -- differently from a voluntary celibate. No two people ever experience life in exactly the same way, because no two people can occupy the same space to view the world from the same precise angle. Truly, each of us is different from everyone else on earth.

  
"The interpretive context"  
What we have been describing is one aspect of what James Smart calls "the interpretative context," the unique set of circumstances in which every person reads, understands, and interprets the Bible. We think we are absorbing the meaning directly from the page, but this act of comprehension in reality is already an interpretation, "the result of an instantaneous and unconscious process by which the words on the page receive specific meanings in our minds. The history of interpretation tells us what widely divergent meanings have been found in the same text" by earnest readers, people of good will, but each person a unique collection of historical experiences who invariably reads and understands the text through those experiences. Hence no one has "direct access to the content of Scripture" no matter how brilliant one's scholarship or profound one's faith. "Every apprehension of the text and every statement of its meaning is an interpretation, and however adequately it expresses the content of the text, it dare not ever be equated with the text itself".*

  
The issue of authority  
In those last words, we are faced with the issue of authority: How confident can I be that my interpretation is the correct one? Indeed, how confident can I ever be that I have grasped the nature of Scripture itself? How does revelation occur? Does the Word become text, or does it become flesh? There are issues at stake far weightier than, e.g. whether the "vice list" of I Corinthians 6:9-11 is adequately translated.

  
So, where are we?  
So where are we? Are we hopelessly cast adrift on a sea of relativism, each one using the Bible to paddle toward one's individual preconceived notions of theological terra firma? As we have seen above, in one sense, there is no alternative to this, since we cannot exist outside the bag of skin in which we live and can have no other perspective on the world except that provided by our own experience. We cannot see farther than the sight each has been given; this is the meaning of human finitude.

But there is an alternative to extreme individualism. We can carry on the task of interpretation, not as individuals, but as members of a community. I share my best information and insight with you, and you share yours with me. Our individual weakness becomes our common strength because it brings us together, at the same time delivering us from the temptation to claim absolute certainty for our own finite interpretation.

  
 
*James D. Smart, The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church: A Study in Hermeneutics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970), pp. 53-54.
 
This article was originally published as an editorial in The InSpiriter, vol.2 no.4. (Spring 1998)