Somewhere along the line, a ton of Christians became convinced of the following rule for Biblical interpretation: Interpret the Bible literally unless it is obvious the passage is not literal. I have no problem with that rule in general, but it seems that more & more I disagree with what's obviously not literal. That's why the actual wording of the literal principle of Biblical interpretation is better: Interpet the passage according to rules of the genre it is written in. This keeps us from assuming something that shouldn't necessarily be assumed.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Literally
Somewhere along the line, a ton of Christians became convinced of the following rule for Biblical interpretation: Interpret the Bible literally unless it is obvious the passage is not literal. I have no problem with that rule in general, but it seems that more & more I disagree with what's obviously not literal. That's why the actual wording of the literal principle of Biblical interpretation is better: Interpet the passage according to rules of the genre it is written in. This keeps us from assuming something that shouldn't necessarily be assumed.
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4 comments:
gotta post you might think is kind of funny... unless you think less of me after it... but i hope not... check it out...
haha...hmmm...I wonder if it's possible to suspend you from my blog for 2 weeks or something :)
not sure if your statement is tongue in cheek, but you'd think that "the meaning God intended" is 1) not the thing most hermeneuts are after; 2) rather simple. uh...i don't think so.
Aaron, I am not sure I understand the wording of your comment...but I agree the wording of my post was not good. I copied and pasted that definition of the literal principle from a site and should have taken the time to find a clearer definition.
I have adjusted the wording
That being said, I think my meaning was clear. To use the literal pinciple doesn't mean we have to take something in a wooden literal sense, but that we should take it in the sense its genre implies.
More and more I discover that people demand a wooden literal meaniing unless it is blatenly obvious otherwise, but that need not be.
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