Along with the anthropomorphic view of scripture given in the The Open Bible, here is an introductory sampling:
It is viewed as the consummate self-help book and, combined with the private interpretation which it counsels us to do, it essentially offers a clay Savior which we form according to our need, then fire in the kiln of our consciences. What we arrive at (so far) is 30,000 differently shaped and sized clay pots.
Exactly!
Sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I’ll once again say something I’ve said in 'nother thread.
Very often we hear people speak of ‘private’ or ‘personal’ interpretation of the Scriptures. Personally though I highly doubt that such a thing
per se even exists. Very often people get a lot of ‘outside help’ from stuff like Pastor so-and-so’s sermons or from items like study aids (footnotes, commentaries, things like that), all of which present to readers ready-made ways to read and interpret the Text.
This is all well and good, but why is it that many people fail to realize that they’re actually relying on other interpretations when building their own ones? I think that once again it has to do with the cultural stereotype of the Bible as ‘God’s book of answers’ and how different the picture in real life is.
Far from being a manual of answers, the Bible is actually a library of ambiguity and conflicting details. If you actually read it without any interpretive glasses, you’ll end up with more questions than answers. For example: just how many women went to Jesus’ tomb? Why do Luke and Matthew list different ancestors for Jesus? Did Judas hang himself or did he suffer a fatal fall? How can we square divinely-sanctioned wartime violence in the OT with the emphasis on ‘love thy neighbor’ in the NT? How can we harmonize the Synoptic image of a Jesus who is very keen to keep His true identity a secret with the more overt figure in John’s gospel? This is what puts off a lot of people from actually cracking the pages of the Bible itself. They expect to see solutions, but what they find is more unsolved problems. They feel that they’re not getting what they imagine they’re supposed to get from it. They think that there’s one way to read the text, one ‘correct’ meaning, that somehow eludes them.
This problem is what the various aids get into. They help reinforce the popular image of a ‘divine answer manual’ and give people their ‘felt needs’ by smoothening out the difficulties and by giving them a ready-made way to interpret the text. They purport to speak for and supplement the Scriptures, but in most cases they practically supplant them: all these aids meld with the Text, effectively becoming part of the Bible, as I have said before ‘a Scripture in place of Scripture’. People think they’re reading the Bible and that what they’re seeing is it interpreting itself, but the reality is that they’re reading an interpretation and that they’re reading the Text into it (or even, they’re reading it
as the Text), which very often is ultimately derived from someone else’s (so it’s not really ‘private’ or ‘personal’).
If people actually begin to hold to the Puritanic biblicist ideal of letting the Bible ‘speak for itself’, with “no note or comment,” and engaged in ‘private’ interpretation
in a true, literal sense (just the text by themselves with no aid whatsoever), there wouldn’t be any clay jars anymore but mounds of potshards, and more likely, fine dirt.
