Alright, well we've been making some really great headway in this course and introduction to a general introduction to the Bible, scripture 101. We're now at lesson seven, how do we interpret the Bible? We've done all this great work, the inspiration of scripture, the inerrancy of scripture, reliability of scripture, how do we get the Bible, what the canon, the canonicity you call it. Now we want to just spend an hour, an hour lesson here looking at the basics of how do we interpret the Bible?
Because none of us want to make anything any mistakes, we don't want to commit any errors regarding scripture, it would accidentally be a heretic, we don't want that, right? So we want to make sure that we're doing things right and we're following a particular guideline so we don't make mistakes when interpreting the Holy Scriptures. And so I want to begin this lesson with 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 2021, there's this great line here where St. Peter says, first of all, you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulsive man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God.
This is a really important verse in the scriptures itself that says, look, the prophecy of scripture is not a matter of one's own interpretation. So you know, you can't just be just kind of exaggerate here a little bit, you know, a very talented top of the class graduate from some divinity school, you got your MDiv or your doctorate in the ministry, your doctorate in theology, whatever, you're very charismatic and now you're going to go out into the world and start a church and start preaching the Holy Gospels and boom, you're the authority. That doesn't work that way, right? It's not a matter of one's own interpretation.
You just can't pick up the scriptures and be the de facto authority as to what it actually means. Yes, of course, as we're going to say, you can pray to the Holy Spirit and ask for wisdom and understanding and study the languages and study all this kind of stuff to understand this better, but ultimately you've got to follow particular guidelines because it's not a matter of one's own personal interpretation. So then the question is, well then who can interpret it, right? If you just can't be this talented master divinity from Yale divinity school, or whoever you are, wherever you graduate from, who is able to interpret the scriptures and how do we understand the scriptures and interpret them correctly?
And that's the big word for interpretation, by the way, is exegesis. Exegesis is simply the art of interpreting the scripture according to the intentions of the author. And that's actually really good segue because part one of this lecture here is understanding the divine and human authors intention. So when we say that the scriptures are the inspired word of God, it is the words of God and the words of men.
We therefore need to understand the human authors intention as well as the divine authors intention. Understanding fully that the primary author is God. It is the Holy Spirit. It's moving men.
We talked about this in a previous lecture, right? God is moving men using their intellect, using their will as free creatures to write what he wants, no more, no less. So in regards this intention of trying to, I'd rather this goal I should say, of understanding the human authors intention and divine authors intention, we got a great quote from the Catechism 109 and 110 that says this. In the sacred scripture, God speaks to man in a human way.
So that's what I mean earlier, right? Instead of buying words of God in human words, in the words of men. So God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to one what the human authors truly wanted to say and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.
All right, so that's very clearly the human authors intention and God's intention, what God wanted to reveal. Then it goes on. In order to discover the sacred author's intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, narrating, then current, where the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in various types of historical writing and prophetic and poetic texts in another forms of literary expression. End quote.
All right, so there's a lot here in just these two paragraphs of the Catechism. All right. So we're going to go on after the other right now and Roman numeral one here in the notes. We're going to look at the human authors intention.
And then we're next. We'll look at that second aspect of what God wanted to reveal to us by their words. And so if we're looking at the human author, oh, really quickly before I move on, this little line here says, truth is differently presented and expressed in various types of writings. So what this means is not that there are different types of truths.
You know, people say this. Oh, yeah, it's all relative. Well, no, it's not. There is only one truth.
There is only God's truth. And truth is a true statement that corresponds to reality, right? So it's all the Catechism is saying here is that truth. There is only one truth and that ultimately that truth is God.
It's God's reality. That truth is differently presented and expressed in different literary forms. So truth can be expressed in different ways. It's still truth.
The expressions of that truth are highlighting different aspects of it. Okay. I just wanted to clarify that in passing kind of parenthetically here. The Catechism is not saying there are different truths.
Only that is expressed differently. And so it is expressed differently in order to understand the human authors intention. We what they wanted to affirm, we have to take into account. We've said this before, right?
We have to take into account their language, their culture, their history, the literary forms that they used, it would be grossly negligent to look at a political text and interpret as if it were legal text. It would be grossly negligent to look at a apocryphal work, an apocryphal section of scripture and try to interpret it as if it were history. You've got to look at these various literary forms and genres and techniques. And there are many of them, right?
There's not just one or two or three. There's tons of them that we have to be aware of. Poetry, hymns or songs, the Psalms, laws, prophecy, liturgy, parables, history, proverbs, idioms, similes, hyperbole, chaiasms, and clusios, and the list goes on and on. There's all kinds of these different literary genres and techniques.
And there's of course the language and the culture that form these various literary techniques, because how the ancient's right history and how the ancient's right legal or political or apocryphal works is different than how we do it. We have different expectations and standards on how we're going to write a historical work. They did it very differently. Okay?
So there's so many examples of this. And I think it's a very obvious point. However, I'm telling you now, there's a lot of people even in scholarly circles who don't respect this basic point and they're going to start lying between their teeth or at least, and that's the worst case scenario. The best case scenario is they're just going to naively commit all kinds of mistakes in interpreting scripture because they don't respect this basic fundamental fact that there are different literary forms behind these affirmations and scripture of both the Old and the Testament.
So for example, Matthew 5, Jesus says, famous line, right? If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Very clearly, Jesus is not speaking literalistically.
He's speaking literarily. This is hyperbole. Jesus is saying, you know, we need to be willing to cut sin out of our lives. And this is what we say in Catholic circles, you've got to stay away from the near occasion of sin.
If you are in a situation that's going to draw you into sin, a relationship, whatever it might be, your computer, your phone, the places that you frequent, the friendships that you keep, et cetera, you've got to cut this out of your life. You've got to cut sin out of your life. So that's just one simple example. Jesus is using hyperbole here and you've got to understand that.
He's not otherwise, you know what? Otherwise, we're all going to be walking around without any eyes, without any hands, without any feet. We're going to look ridiculous, right? Because we're all sin with our eyes and with our mouth, our tongues and with our hands and all the rest of it, right?
So this is clearly hyperbole. It is a literary device. There's this other example I have here in your notes, John chapter 14, this beautiful, it's very moving, this very moving line where Jesus says, John 14, two through three, in my father's house, there are many rooms. If it were not so, what I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself and where I am, you may be also.
And like, oh, that's really nice. You know, Jesus is going to prepare a place for us in heaven and that sounds really lovely. Well, there's a lot more to this in the Hebrew and the culture of the Jews during the time of Christ. There is this background of matrimony behind Jesus' statement.
So what would happen is a man would be betrothed to a woman. This is legal marriage. Like, so for example, when Joseph and Mary are betrothed, this is not engagement. It is a legal marriage.
Jesus was born in a legal marriage. He was born to a father and a mother and it's ridiculous when people are out there on social media and everywhere else saying that Jesus was born out of wedlock. That's not true. Joseph and Mary are legally married.
They're betrothed. Well, what would happen is during the patrol period, the husband would go and prepare a home for his new beloved wife. And this would take time and kind of an in-turn amount of time, more or less six months to a year, whatever it might be. Then afterwards, he would go to collect his bride and bring her with great rejoicing and celebration and procession to the new house and they would live common life together.
Okay? So Jesus is saying, look, I go to prepare home for you. In other words, what he's saying is I'm the bridegroom, right? There's so much biblical background to this.
Jesus is the divine bridegroom who comes to betrothed himself to his bride, which is what happens on the cross. And he's going to, in his ascension, be the depart from his bride for a while to prepare the home. But at his second coming, Jesus will collect this church, his bride, and bring the church and great rejoicing and celebration and procession to our heavenly homeland. Okay?
It's so much more beautiful when you understand the background of the culture. And that's just another example of what we need to do in order to interpret scripture correctly and even just to fall in love with it more and see the deeper connections. You've got to understand the language, the culture, the history, and all these literary forms. All right?
So I hope that makes sense. And as I said before, we can't impose our rules and standards and expectations of literary forms on theirs. We've got to use the example earlier about history. When someone writes a history essay or dissertation or term paper or whatever, it is a book today, we have all kinds of expectations in the modern 20th and 21st century Western world of how to do that.
It's got to be very precise and everything's got to be documented and it's got to be in chronological order, et cetera, et cetera. Well, back in the ancient world, I mean they used all kinds of different forms and techniques and they had certain expectations that we wouldn't have. You know, they would do summarization or repetition or they would do reorganization or even skip over certain details. Like a great example of this is the genealogies.
Often when you're reading genealogies, you're going to see that it seems very precise. There's a genealogy of exactly 10 generations. You're like, mmm, interesting. Is this exactly 10 generations?
Well, it certainly could be, but 10 is also the number of completion. And so it's kind of summarizing in a numerical, symbolic way that this era is complete and total, right? And you find this a lot in Genesis and other places. Another good example actually is the genealogy of Jesus and Matthew, where Matthew breaks down the genealogy from the Old Testament all the way down to Jesus Christ in three sets of 14 generations.
And a lot of scholars are going to be like, hey, wait a minute, this isn't right. This skip over this person or this skip over this person. And you're like, yeah, duh, there's Matthew is doing a particular, or observing a particular literary device where he's trying to prove that Jesus is the son of David because 14 is David's number, right? So anyway, it's not time to get into the details.
My point to you is that, again, you can impose our standards and rules upon them. They've got other purposes in mind and they're using various literary genres in their own culture and context that we have got to respect in order to understand the human office intention. Okay? And there are various historical critical methods that, you know, Haudy, Haudy, scholars will dive into such as textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, reduction criticism, all of these.
I use the word the expression Haudy, Haudy, right? It's much. It's very, very high level methods of exercise to try to figure out, you know, what sources were used or how did the text take different shapes and forms over the course of its development, et cetera, et cetera. And so that is valuable within reason because you're going to try to understand, you know, certain things in the background.
But in any case, that's pretty much all I want to say about that. But those, it could be used poorly. It could be used wrongly, especially when it denies the divine authorship of scripture. But these historical critical methods do serve a purpose when it's used properly.
And another time we'll talk about this. I've been at the 16th, really puts into perspective. Okay. So this is all the human authors intention.
What we need to look at, what we need to strive for what our goal is and the boundaries that we need to play in. So then it goes on, of course, let's talk about the divine authors because up above here in this catechism quote, one on one ten, it says, we need to look at what God wanted to reveal to us by their words. So now let's look at the divine authors' intention.