How to Interpret the Scripture?

Fr. Joachim Trytania

As believers, we do not read the Bible merely to be informed about its content or to be inspired by its religious message. We read the Scripture in order to be transformed, to be shaped and reshaped by that message so that we can reveal it in new and authentic ways in the manner we live our lives.

Whether we realize or not, we are always involved in complex of reinterpretation. We do not simply read the Bible in order to discover what it meant to the original community. We are interested in what the Bible might say to us today, and in some ways it might say something quite different than it said to those who first heard it. This calls for reinterpretation.

The reason the Bible might be interpreted differently lies in changes that take place in our human history. Let us take, for example, the understanding of family. It has changed dramatically not only over the centuries but even in our own lifetime. We may have grown up thinking that a family consisted of Father, Mother, Dick and Jane, Spot the dog and Whiskers the cat. Today we have nuclear families, extended families, single-parent families and multiple-marriage families to name but a few examples. We now realize that when we read the word "family," we cannot automatically presume that we know what is meant by the term. The same is true with various expressions found in the Bible. Our contemporary awareness of racial or gender bias makes us sensitive to the way characters in the biblical stories relate to people of different races or to the status accorded to women in the society described. There are times that we cannot simply take the words of the Bible and apply them to our lives. Most of us knows that reinterpretation is rather difficult to do and that the customs of a distant culture do not fit the experience of our own. What should we do? It is neither necessary nor wise to reject the biblical message outright. Using the right commentary we might be able to come to new insights into how we can be faithful to the meaning of the biblical message in our times.

As we read some of the teaching found in the Scripture, we can see the need for such reinterpretation. For example, when the authors refer to the neighboring Edomites, Philistines and Samaritans with loathing. Certainly the summons of Jesus to love even one's enemies requires that we do more than loathe those who are different than we are. Interpretation will help us to see that these ancient political enemies frequently also posed a religious threat to the people of Israel. Reinterpretation will encourage us to discover what in our own lives challenges our religious integrity. Sometimes the biblical message does not challenge contemporary experience so much as contemporary insight challenges the biblical community.

We believe that God was revealed in the lives of our religious ancestors. We also believe that the traditions that they developed to describe and to explain this divine self-revelation, traditions that are contained within the Bible, also reveal God. What we must also remember is that God is revealed in our lives as well. We face the same challenge that was faced by believers down the centuries. We are called to bring the experience of our own lives into creative dialogue with our religious tradition in order to discover anew the God who is with us. We are called to transform our lives in accord with this new discovery.