You see, one particular post on this site stated 'If God speaks, why can't He get His story straight?' They were talking about how there are so many different interpretations of Scripture. I replied something to the extent that it is possible for the story-teller to get his story right and for the people reading it to twist it to the way they like it. I said that I think this is why we have divisions. After several statements from many of the people on that site and many statements back from me, someone finally said what I stated above about everything being interpreted by a subjective being must come up with a subjective interpretation. I disagree. We all look up and see the sky if we have eyes. We all see our hands if we have hands and eyes. If we look down we see the ground beneath us. We may call it different things but reality is what it is. It does not change because of what we call it. Reality around us is what it is and what we call it does not change it or change the reality we see. A chair's substance does not change if you call it a table. Ok so you may ask, 'what the heck are you arguing about? We all know that.' Well if we believe that the Bible truly has multiple interpretations or a new meaning to different people we are believing that chairs are turning into tables because we call them that. This is serious for many reasons, one of which is it will cripple our ability to witness educated people. (by educated I mean by secular universities) We continue as christians to talk in terms of this is what it means to me and such like we do many times when talking about the Bible. In doing so we prove that we are reading the Bible the same way existentialism teaches to, which is the foundation of all non-absolute thinking. We therefore weaken the Bible's power by adding our meaning to it. At this point I will let someone who has helped bring this idea home for me speak, for he is much clearer on the subject.
"If there is only one life to live in this world, and if it is not to be wasted, nothing seemed more important to me than finding out what God really meant in the Bible, since he inspired men to write it. If that was up for grabs, the no one could tell which life is worthy and which life is wasted. I was stunned at the gamesmanship in the scholarly world as authors used all their intellectual powers to nullify what they themselves wrote! That is, they expressed theories of meaning argued there is no single, valid meaning in texts. Ordinary people reading this book will ( I hope) find this incredible. I don't blame you. It is. But the fact remains that to this day well-paid, well-fed professors use tuition and tax dollars to argue that 'since literature does not accurately convey reality, literary interpretation need not accurately convey the reality which is literature.' In other words, since we can't know objective reality outside ourselves, there can be no objective meaning in what we write either. So interpretation does not mean trying to find any objective thing that an author put in a text, but simply means that we express the ideas the ideas that enter our head as we read. Which doesn't really matter because when others read what we have written, they won't have any access to our intention either. It's all a game. Only it is sinister, because all these scholars (and small-group members) insist that their own love letters and contracts be measured by one rule: what they intended to say. Any mumbo-jumbo about creatively hearing 'yes' when I wrote 'no' will not go down at the bank or the marriage counselor" (John Piper in "Don't Waste Your Life")
This is not just a subject for a certain few, its for all. When you talk or write you want to be understood for what you really mean. God does too.
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