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Hermeneutics Quotes

Browse 58 quotes about Hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics Quotes

“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”

MindPhilosophyReligionLiteratureIntellectualEpistemologyHermeneutics
Book:صونًا للفلسفة والدين
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“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.”

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Book:The Reformation
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“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.”

ReligionReadingLiteratureBibleSacredScriptureInterpretationAestheticHermeneutics
Book:Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian
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“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.”

FaithChristianityLife PhilosophyBibleChristian LivingHermeneutics
Book:Read the Bible for a Change: Understanding and Responding to God's Word
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“The literal sense of the author was "creation is the orderly act of a loving Creator God." What the modern reader often hears, however, is "The universe was made in six 24-hour days." This is as wrong-headed as taking me to mean I actually stood in line a million years or that my cardiac tissue has been torn in half or that Christ had delusions of being a grape plant. -- Making Senses of Scripture”

ChristianReligionChristianityBibleTheologyLiteralHermeneuticsFigurative LanguageFigurative
Author:Mark Shea
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“A great many skeptics are unfortunately put to waste, in that they vainly focus their energy on ridiculing a certain tiny denomination of Biblical fundamentalism, a denomination seated just one chair away from unbelief. They, the skeptics, cannot believe because they are the most literal of fundamentalists: of those who must interpret Scripture as simply an obsolete, absolutely dead compilation of intellectual incompetence. Nevertheless, by all means, because, after all, that is supposed to happen - Scripture states of itself that all thought and interpretation is folly without the Holy Spirit - however the ironic thing is the case in which one believes that the Bible is, in its true essence, completely outdated. And like flashes in a pan, he hints at his naivety, that he knows little about the world around him, little about those who live in it. Either that, or he knows little about what Scripture really says in relation to the world around him, little about what it really says in relation to those who live in it. It is as though he is the one dead to the world and it to him. He has not the Spirit to give life to his own spirit; he can only possibly understand Scripture as long-deceased rather than the modern world's very living narrative.”

GodChristianityBibleScriptureHoly SpiritSkepticismFundamentalismApologeticsHermeneuticsEtymology
Book:Healology
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“There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees a complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost canonical status in Protestant theology. But now we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.”

BibleScriptureHermeneuticsKarl Barth
Book:Church Dogmatics 1.2: The Doctrine of the Word of God
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“The demand that the Bible should be read and understood and expounded historically is, therefore, obviously justified and can never be taken too seriously. The Bible itself posits this demand: even where it appeals expressly to divine commissionings and promptings, in its actual composition it is everywhere a human word, and this human word is obviously intended to be taken seriously and read and understood and expounded as such. To do anything else would be to miss the reality of the Bible and therefore the Bible itself as the witness of revelation. The demand for a "historical" understanding of the Bible necessarily means, in content, that we have to take it for what it undoubtedly is and is meant to be: the human speech uttered by specific men at specific times in a specific situation, in a specific language and with a specific intention. It means that the understanding of it has honestly and unreservedly been one which is guided by all these consideration. If the word "historical" is a modern word, the thing itself was not really invented in modern times. And if the more exact definition of what is "historical" in this sense is liable to change and has actually changed at times, it is still quite clear that when and wherever the Bible has been really read and expounded, in this sense it has been read "historically" and not unhistorically, i.e., its concrete humanity has not been ignored. To the extent that it has been ignored, it has not been read at all. We have, therefore, not only no cause to retract from this demand, but every cause to accept it strictly on theological grounds. (§19.1, p. 464)”

BibleHermeneuticsKarl Barth
Author:Karl Barth
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“There is no such thing as a special biblical hermeneutics. But we have to learn that hermeneutics which is alone and generally valid by means of the Bible as the witness of revelation. We therefore arrive at the suggested rule, not from a general anthropology, but from the Bible, and obviously, as the rule which is alone and generally valid, we must apply it first to the Bible. The fact that we have to understand and expound the Bible as a human word can now be explained rather more exactly in this way: that we have to listen to what it says to us as a human word. We have to understand it as a human word in the light of what it says. Under the caption of a truly "historical" understanding of the Bible we cannot allow ourselves to commend an understanding which does not correspond to the rule suggested: a hearing in which attention is paid to the biblical expressions but not to what the words signify, in which what is said is not heard or overheard; an understanding of the biblical words from their immanent linguistic and factual context, instead of from what they say and what we hear them say in this context; an exposition of the biblical words which in the last resort consists only in an exposition of the biblical men in their historical reality. To this we must say that it is not an honest and unreserved understanding of the biblical word as a human word, and it is not therefore an historical understanding of the Bible. In an understanding of this kind the Bible cannot be witness. In this type of understanding, in which it is taken so little seriously, indeed not at all, as a human word, the possibility of its being witness is taken away from the very outset. The philosophy which lies behind this kind of understanding and would force us to accept it as the only true historical understanding is not of course a very profound or respectable one. But even if we value it more highly, or highest of all, and are therefore disposed to place great confidence in its dictates, knowing what is involved in the understanding of the Bible, we can only describe this kind of understanding of the reality of a human word as one which cannot possibly do justice to its object. Necessarily, therefore, we have to reject most decisively the intention of even the most profound and respectable philosophy to subject any human word and especially the biblical word to this understanding. The Bible cannot be read unbiblically. And in this case that means that it cannot be read with such a disregard for its character even as a human word. It cannot be read so unhistorically. §19.1, pp. 466-467)”

BibleScriptureHermeneuticsKarl Barth
Book:Church Dogmatics 1.2: The Doctrine of the Word of God
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“There are good theological reasons to reject making authorial intention the goal of the interpretation of Scripture. First, we must recognize that what has traditionally been considered authoritative for the church is Scripture, not the intentions, real or imagined, of the original authors. Yes, Christian interpreters throughout history have talked about what Paul or some other biblical writer may have meant to say, but that has traditionally not been taken to limit the meaning of the text to that intention. Thus, even if the psalmist intended to speak of David or some other king of ancient Israel, the church has always considered it legitimate to interpret the psalm as referring also—or even only or supremely—to Christ. Even if the human authors did not intend to affirm the Trinity in the first century, the church may legitimately interpret Scripture in Trinitarian terms. The church has traditionally not located the site of inspiration to be in the mind of the human author but in the text of Scripture itself. The shift to concentrating on the intentions of the human author is something that only happened in the modern era, with the rise of historical criticism.”

ChristianityBibleScriptureInterpretationHermeneuticsBiblical InterpretationHistorical CriticismAuthorial Intent
Book:Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation
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“In my view, the gospels are true, not historically, but theologically, or, as I would argue, prophetically! What we have is, the Messiah’s history written in advance in story form.”

InspirationalBibleCriticismTheologyInterpretationAcademicProphecyNew TestamentSymbolismApocalypticHermeneuticsExegesisGospelsLiterary Analysis
Book:The Little Book of Revelation: The First Coming of Jesus at the End of Days
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“What is the difference between my view and the classical Christian perspective? I am convinced that there are not multiple comings and multiple returns of Christ, but only one decisive coming at the end of the world, which includes the resurrection, the rapture, and his appearance in the sky!”

InspirationalReligionSpiritualityJesusBibleMysticismInterpretationAcademicProphecyEnd TimesSymbolismMessiahHermeneuticsExegesis
Book:The Little Book of Revelation: The First Coming of Jesus at the End of Days
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“Good docents often begin by asking the viewer, “What do you see in this work?” The idea that the expert should be allowed to constrain the interpretation of others rightly offends our sensibilities about museums and art. It ought to offend us just as much when applied to Scripture.”

ChristianityBibleScriptureInterpretationHermeneuticsBiblical Interpretation
Book:Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation
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“I urge not that we assume that love will provide a reliable foundation for knowledge but that we nonetheless keep the requirements of love of neighbor foremost in our interpretations of Scripture. We should consider, for example, love to be a necessary criterion (a minimum) when defending an interpretation of Scripture even if it cannot be a sufficient criterion that will guarantee ethical interpretation.”

LoveBibleInterpretationHermeneuticsBible InterpretationBiblical Interpretation
Book:Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation
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“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.”

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Author:China Miéville
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“One of the things that happened when the church moved from meetings in homes to having purpose-built buildings beginning before, but accelerated during, the Constantinian era, is that while the church itself was becoming less Jewish in character, it began to apply a more and more Old Testament hermeneutic to its discussions about church, ministry, and sacraments. The church began to be seen as a temple or basilica, the Lord’s Supper began to be seen as a sacrifice, and naturally enough the ones offering the sacrifices, just as in Leviticus, were seen to be priests. There was the further move in this direction when Sunday began to be seen as the Sabbath, another example of this same sort of hermeneutic. There were considerable problems with this whole hermeneutic from the start, since nowhere in the New Testament is there set up a class of priests or clerics to administer any sacraments. Indeed, nowhere was there a clear separation between life in the home and life in church. What has often been missed in the discussions of the effects of all this is that it ruled women out of ministry in the larger church and indeed ruled them out of celebrating the Lord’s Supper as well, since in the Old Testament only males were priests and only priests could offer sacrifices.”

Old TestamentPriesthoodHermeneuticsLord S SupperEarly Church
Book:Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper
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“Many in our world today want us to believe that we can except Christ simply as a Savior from sin, but not the Lord of our lives. They teach essentially that a person can perform an act of believing on Christ once, and after this, they can fall away even into total unbelief and yet still supposedly be "saved". Christ does not call men in this way. Christ does not save men in this way. The true Christian is the one continually coming, always believing in Christ. Real Christian faith is an ongoing faith, not a one-time act. If one wishes to be eternally satiated, one meal is not enough. If we wish to feast on the bread of heaven, we must do so all our lives. We will never hunger or thirst if we are always coming and always believing in Christ. He's our sufficiency. Christ the bread from heaven. We must feed on all of Christ, not just the parts we happen to like. Christ is not the Savior of anyone unless He is their Lord as well.”

ChristianityTheologyBible StudyReligion And PhiloshophyCalvinismHermeneuticsBible InterpretationReformed TheologyExegesis
Book:Drawn by the Father: A study of John 6:35-45
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“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.”

FeminismIndividualismFundamentalismEpistemologyHermeneuticsExegesisBiblicismBuffered Self
Book:A Year of Biblical Womanhood
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“as one utilizes the findings of modern scholarship, one renews an essential characteristic of Jewish learning. Biblical exegesis in rabbinic and medieval Judaism has always focused on debate and variety….[T]he post-modern Jew revels in the diverse voices and counter-voices [discovered by critical Bible scholarship] so reminiscent of Talmudic and contemporary dialectic. (from "The Scroll of Isaiah as Jewish Scripture, Or Why Jews Don't Read Books," in Society of Biblical Literature 1996 Seminar Papers)”

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Author:Benjamin Sommer
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“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?”

PhilosophyChristianityMetaphysicsHermeneuticsExegesisBiblical InterpretationMyth Of Progress
Book:Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis
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“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.”

Bible StudyPostmodernismDeconstructionHermeneuticsDerridaExegesisDeconstructionismNew Historicism
Book:The New Testament and the People of God
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“Too often scholars have thought and even suggested that what happened during and after Constantine was that the church sought to replace the pagan temples, priests, and sacrifices with their own. This is at best a half truth. If this had been primarily what was going on, we would have expected to find priestesses showing up in the mainstream church in and after the time of Constantine, since there were certainly priestesses in the pagan temples. But this we do not find in the historical record. This is because the church of that period was not merely trying to supplant pagan religion with Christian religion, though some of that was going on. More to the point, there was a rising tide of anti-Judaism, and one of its manifestations was this Old Testament hermeneutic. The Torah had been claimed as the church’s book, Jews were being ostracized and then later ghettoized, and a hermeneutic of ministry was being adopted which co-opted the Old Testament for church use when it came to priests, temples, and sacrifices, and indeed sacraments in general. Thus ironically enough while the structure of the ecclesial church was becoming more Old Testamental, the church hierarchy was not only becoming less tolerant of Jews, it was forgetting altogether the Jewish character of Jesus’ ministry and his modifications of the Passover that led to the Lord’s Supper celebration of the early church in the first place.”

ChristianityOld TestamentPriesthoodHermeneuticsConstantineLord S Super
Book:Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper
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“Paul is not the one who needs an update—we do, considering that the tools used for interpretation have already been updated. They can help us find where many interpretations of the same texts have varied among those who hold a high view of Scripture.”

HermeneuticsContextEphesiansPauline Epistles
Book:Nobody's Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament
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“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.”

HermeneuticsDialecticalHistorical Materlialism
Book:The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
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“To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.”

LooksArtTurnsLiteratureDifficultCenturySkillsDegreesDetermineImpulseAcademicFlatteryTwentieth CenturyAcademyCalculationsEsotericHermeneutics
Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?
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“Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued.”

NeedsSecretEssentialsClientsAestheticsAxiomsPlatitudesHermeneutics
Author:George Steiner
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“How can this strange story of God made flesh, of a crucified Savior, of resurrection and new creation become credible for those whose entire mental training has conditioned them to believe that the real world is the world which can be satisfactorily explained and managed without the hypothesis of God? I know of only one clue to the answering of that question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: a congregation which believes it.”

KnowsWorldBelieveMadeRealStoriesCreationStrangeTrainingFleshReal WorldSaviorResurrectionClueHypothesisCredibleCongregationHermeneuticsStrange Stories
Author:Lesslie Newbigin
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“I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the methodical path of the Jesuits.... It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that all can reach salvation.”

Has BeensIdeasDifficultSimpleDecisionOpinionPathDemandEssenceCatholicSalvationScriptureGrantedRevelationsSubtleInterpretationUsersIconsProtestantsJesuitMethodicalHermeneuticsMacintoshSumptuousPersonal Decisions
Author:Umberto Eco
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“When it happeneth that a man signifieth unto us two contradictory opinions whereof the one is clearly and directly signified, andthe other either drawn from that by consequence, or not known to be contradictory to it; then (when he is not present to explicate himself better) we are to take the former of his opinions; for that is clearly signified to be his, and directly, whereas the other might proceed from error in the deduction, or ignorance of the repugnancy.”

MenTwoMightLanguageKnownOpinionIgnoranceConsequenceErrorsFormerInterpretationContradictoryDeductionsHermeneutics
Book:The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic: Part I, Human Nature, Part II, De Corpore Politico ; with Three Lives
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“What hermeneutics teaches is that progress comes from being exposed to different points of views because there's no point of view that is right for all situations and all times. And even if it's superior to the others, you can enrich it by drawing on others or thinking: "Why is that wrong and how do I improve my approach? How do I come up with a better approach?" So that's essential for innovation just like it is in technology.”

IfsThinkingDifferentViewsSituationTeachTechnologyProgressEssentialsApproachInnovationCome UpPoint Of ViewDrawingSuperiorsAll TimeExposedNo PointDifferent Points Of ViewHermeneutics
Author:Charles Koch
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