Interpretation
Step 2: Interpretation
Learning Objectives
After this section, you should be able to:
• Identify some tools that help us move beyond the limits of our own understanding of a Bible text
• Summarize some ways integrated Bible study software can help us identify the interpretive options
Introduction: Getting to the Meaning
The second step of good Bible study involves interpretation. This is working on the meaning of the passage. A lot of people read the Bible and they think, perhaps naively, that they immediately know what the text says. That’s not always the case. Sometimes terms have a technical force where they are limited by what’s going on in the context, that kind of thing. Sometimes the context is ambiguous enough that you can’t be sure whether it means one thing or another, or whether a text is supposed to be taken literally or figuratively. And so there are choices that face the interpreter. What’s the best way to get oriented to these kinds of things and get your hands around the meaning?
Relying on Your Own Understanding
One way is to do it the old-fashioned way and just try and do it on your own ability and your own strength. There is something to be said—in fact, a lot to be said—for studying the Bible on your own and staying engaged, just [having] you and the Bible together with the Spirit as you interact with what it is that God is saying.
But that also can be a little bit limiting, because the Spirit’s worked in the lives of a lot of people, and there are people around the world who produced all kinds of tools to help you—people who have developed expertise in given areas and who have given their lives to studying the Bible. So why should you think [that] in the few minutes that you sit with an open text, you could do better than someone who, say, has spent twenty or thirty years working in a passage and developed a specialty about it?
Using Tools
Study Bibles
This means that there are tools that can help us interpret the text, and perhaps the simplest tool to get your hands on is a really good study Bible: a Bible that has notes underneath that will trigger the historical context or the social context that’s at work. It may note parallel passages or the way in which a word is used by a given writer or in a given context. These good study Bibles are really helpful in orienting you to a text, and there are all kinds of good study Bibles out there that have been produced by various publishers. Usually a good translation will have a study Bible version that their translation teams have helped them to produce, and most of these study Bibles are what I would call textual study Bibles—they’re simply engaged in helping you interact with the meaning of the text.
But there also are other study Bibles that also are quite valuable. Zondervan has an archaeological study Bible in particular that’s very, very helpful, and it goes through and marks the key archaeological studies and the key features of social life and culture that are informing a given passage. So it’s a study Bible with a particular slant that helps you particularly in areas that often are hard to find help in. There also is an apologetics study Bible that Broadman & Holman has produced, and this is a very helpful text in dealing with the kinds of objections that people sometimes face when they read the Bible, and responding to that.
So one type of tool is the study Bible. It will be short, crisp notes built to show you parallel passages and built to help you understand what’s going on.
Commentaries
A second kind of important tool in getting your hands around interpretation is a good commentary. A good commentary lets you know first of all what the passage might mean, and then helps you sort out to determine what it does mean and, importantly, why it means that—why that meaning is better than the alternative meaning. Good commentaries also, of course, help you work through the sequential development of how a book’s argument is working.
Commentaries are a wonderful source of help in thinking through studying the Bible. Commentaries come in all shapes and sizes. There are very technical commentaries that are working directly with the original languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic that we see in the Bible. There are also commentaries that are aimed at a preaching level, that are designed to help pastors with sermons. There are commentaries that are aimed at the application level, that are designed to help you think about how to apply the Bible. The NIV Application Commentary series is an example of this. And so there are a variety of commentaries out there.
Integrated Bible Software
One of the beauties of Logos software has been its use of these kinds of tools, both study Bibles and commentaries that are available to you. In fact, the commentary collection on the Logos software platform is extensive. You can go to any book and find literally dozens of commentaries that discuss it. So you might even need help as to which commentaries are the best and most helpful. Which commentaries do you connect with the best in order to decide, what commentary should I read while I’m studying the Bible? But the resources are there, and that’s very, very helpful.
Being Aware of Interpretive Options
Now, when you actually approach a passage, it’s very, very important to be aware of what your interpretive options are. These tools can help you become aware of those kinds of differences, and in fact, what you’ll find when you start to use commentaries is that commentators don’t always agree on what’s going on in the passage, and they discuss the options. They may make different choices between one another.
You want to pay attention about what the choice is—“This is what the passage means”—and why the interpreter says that’s a better meaning than the other meaning. If you’re getting down to this level, you’re really digging into your Bible study, and sometimes the disputes and the differences will be very, very fascinating in terms of trying to think through, what is it that the Bible is really, actually saying?
Concordances and Word Studies
A final part of interpretation deals with the meaning of words and phrases, and that kind of thing. The concordance, or the search capabilities that you have in gathering together information on how this particular term is used in this particular context, in light of and in contrast to the way that term might be used in other passages in other contexts, is an important part of study in opening up to you what the possibilities are as well what’s going on in a given passage. Working with the concordance, and working with your search feature in your program, is a very, very important means of being able to nail down how words are being used.
Just to take our example from Acts 1:8, we have the word “power” that is being used in this passage. “Power,” in this passage and in this context, since it alludes to the arrival of the Spirit, is really talking about enablement and capability. “Power” is being used in that way. It’s not the normal way we use “power.” When we think of power, we think of force being applied to something, or something like that. When someone has power, they have a position and a status. They may also have capability, but they have a position and a status that they’re exercising. Or if someone has power, they have not just the position that they have but they have the ability to use force and violence in a way that might overtake someone else. That’s normally how we use the word “power” in our speech today. But here in Acts 1:8, if we were to do a concordance study and work with the context, we would see that the power we’re talking about is tied to the arrival of the Spirit in indwelling the person, and in doing that, the idea is of an enablement and a capability that they now have that they didn’t possess before the Spirit came.
Well, you would find that out by doing a concordance study, a word study on the term “power.” Look at how it’s used in Scripture, and pay particular attention to how Luke—Acts is using the word, in order to get a sense of what’s going on exactly in Acts 1:8, as you move to interpret the passage and understand what it means to say, “You’ve been clothed with power from on high.”
