Proclaimer Blog
Who’s in control?
We're preaching through Ecclesiastes in the autumn, and this quote from Iain Provan in the NIV Application Commentary is helpful. He is describing how many commentators struggle to understand the book and therefore end up re-interpreting what the text actually says:
A possible response to our problematic book might be to find ways of reinterpreting what it has to say – perhaps by resorting to the kind of allegorical, spiritualising approach to biblical interpretation that was so popular amongst ancient and medieval Christian commentators. As the long history of biblical interpretation has itself shown, however, this approach makes it simply to easy to force the text to say what one wishes it to say and thus simply to subvert its authority in a different way. Such an interpretative method may increase the reader's comfort level, but it can do great violence to the text.
When, for example, Jerome interprets Ecclesiastes as a treatise aiming 'to show the utter vanity of every sublunary enjoyment, and hence the necessity of betaking oneself to an ascetic life devoted entirely to the service of God' it seems obvious to us (although presumably not to Jerome) that the text is not in control of Jerome, but Jerome of the text. His method of reading enabled him too easily to shape the text in his own image and disabled him from hearing anything in it that might challenge his own assumptions and beliefs.
What are you working on at the moment. And who's in control?