Quotes about Text

Of the many ways to describe or articulate the Torah, two are pertinent in our text: one can either multiply laws so as to cover all possible situations, or one can reduce the law to its essence.

Sometimes in our zeal to "apply" a text, we fail to read the text in its context. And more often than we may all care to admit, our frustrations over how to apply a text can be completely resolved with a more accurate interpretation.

In his book The Indelible Image, New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III reiterates a common piece of interpretive wisdom: "A text without a context is just a pretext for what we want it to mean.

The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod — and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.

Charles Spurgeon underscored this point, saying, "For every text in Scripture, there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is Christ. And my dear brother, your business is, when you get to a text, to say, 'Now what is the road to Christ?' . . . I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it."51

I'm a reader and a storyteller, and God chose literature and story and poetry as the languages of my spiritual text. To me, the Bible is a manifesto, a guide, a love letter, a story.

Whatever one says on the air is bound to be misunderstood; for people take from the heard or printed discourse that which they are predisposed to hear or read, not what is there- all that TV can do is to increase the number of misunderstanders by many thousandfold — and at the same time to increase the range of misunderstanding by providing no objective text to which the voluntarily ignorant can be made to refer.

With so many contradictory renditions of the biblical text, the public has lost confidence that we can actually know what the Bible says. It is an easy step from this skepticism to an indifference about what the Bible says.

My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text.

There are usually multiple messages that could be preached from the same text.

My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits — the relevant fruits — are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits

Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.