Daggah

As Doubting Thomas's handy and well-written article (<a href="http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=192" target="_blank">"Christian Salvation"</a>) shows, many of the various sects and denominations of Christianity disagree on their interpretations of the Bible, often times in some very important areas. This leads me to ask: how do Christians know whether their interpretation, or their sect's interpretation, is correct? What objective methodology is used? Is it often subjective?

And I don't consider this important enough to start a new thread in Moral Foundations & Principles, but if subjective methodologies are used to verify Biblical interpretation, can Biblical morality really be called objective?

CX

My experience has been that sectarian positions are usually defended with the logically invincible "No True Scotsman" argument. Wait I just realized that's a fallacy not an argument. I give up. What's the answer?

Daggah

I'm really hoping for some responses from Christians on the forum.

kctan

The holy spirit guided them in the interpretations. How the hell it cause them to have different outcomes beats the hell out of me.

Maybe there's more then one ghost... of a thought ?

Amos

While I am not professed Christian I hold that the bible is properly interpreted when all apparent anomalies and paradoxes are removed through the explantion of their true meaning.

Bartok

The method used by most moderate to liberal Christians is the historical-critical method. This method basically attempts to view the text through the eyes of the world in which it was written, to find its original purpose, who wrote it, what was going on at the time, etc. From here, conclusions are reached as to what the beliefs about God at the time were and what we might learn from these texts today. The conclusions based on this method do tend to be a little more subjective as people's individual situations, experiences, and traditions play in to how they see the text applies today.

jpbrooks

It may not even be possible to find an interpretive method that completely eliminates subjectivity. Interpretation is a process that proceeds by hypothesis. And hypothesis creation/selection is necessarily a subjective "process".

David Bowden

Logic would normally become valuable here, offering tools for examining a subjectively-formed hypothesis according to well-established forms, and separating valid interpretations from invalid ones according to universally acceptable criteria.

But alas logic and scriptural interpretation have a very unsteady relationship. The ideal from a logical standpoint would be a completely consistent interpretation, resulting in a single unambiguous tradition, but that assumes that the Bible is a text which can support a single, consistent interpretation.

The history of denominations, and the diverse nature and origins of the text itself, would tend to indicate that such an assumption is unwarranted. So we're back to subjectivity bounded by one's "sense" of what is appropriate, and the rise of thousands of incompatible statements of faith.

-Wanderer

jpbrooks

You're right about this. Any tool that reduces reliance on subjectivity would aid in the process of determining correct interpretations.

But isn't the idea that the Bible is a text that is supposed to provide a single consistent interpretation precisely what is implicitly assumed by biblical criticism itself? If it's ok for the Bible to have more than one interpretation, why would its entire text be rejected as false just because one of its (possible) interpretations is deemed false? (E.g., an allegorical interpretation of the Bible's text could still be true even if its plain text reading is demonstrated to be false.)

But it's not usually the entire Biblical text that is in dispute among the various denominations of Christianity. It is usually just a few verses (at most) that form the basis of huge theological debates and divisions within Christianity. The rest of the Bible is considered beyond controversy. This leads one to believe that better methods of scriptural interpretation might help to resolve some existing interpretive controversies.