An essential skill to interpreting the Bible well is to understand what the author was trying to communicate to their original audience in their original time period. After you, the reader, establish that historical reality, you can extract the core meaning of the text and import it to our current faith practice. God doesn’t change, but culture does. God’s heart for people needs to be expressed in ways that the modern person can understand and apply it appropriately.
Many people get lost in this journey of interpretation. And sometimes, people can even abuse Scripture in order to control others, or to lead them down a selfish path.
The Greek derivative of the word “heresy” literally means “act of choosing.” Heresy is simply selective truth – we pay attention to what we want, and don’t pay attention to the rest. It takes humility to listen to the whole truth and not twist texts to mean what you want them to mean. It also takes humility to not let your traditions and biases affect your understanding of God’s Word.
James W. Sire writes a wonderful book that lays out the general ways that cults twist Scripture. It’s worth the read simply because it shines a light on our own erroneous tendencies, while depicting them in the worst possible way. For those of you interested in going deeper – here is his book, and here is his table of contents.
The Text of Scripture
- Inaccurate quotations
- Twisted translations
Scripture as Rhetoric
- Using the Bible as a hook
Scripture as Literature
- Ignoring the immediate context
- Collapsing the context between 2 or more immediate texts
- Overspecification – speculation – don’t go beyond what was being written
- The figurative fallacy – mistaken literal language for figurative language – spiritualizing
- Speculative reading of predictive prophecy
Scripture as Evidence
- Saying but not citing
- Selective citing
- Inadequate evidence: argument and evidence
Reasoning from Scripture
- Confused definition
- Ignoring alternative explanations
- The obvious fallacy
- Virtue by association
The Authority of the Bible
- The esoteric interpretation
- Supplementing Biblical authority
- Rejecting Biblical authority
Worldview Confusion
- Worldview confusion
- Attempts to make universal laws out of isolated texts – center on major doctrines not minor points
Tags: scripture, interpretation, cults, twisting, originalmeaning
