This is from something I have often suggested here:
A more significant reason for the need to interpret lies in the nature of Scripture itself. Historically the church has understood the nature of Scripture much the same as it has understood the person of Christ — the Bible is at the same time both human and divine. As Professor George Ladd once put it: “The Bible is the Word of God given in the words of [people] in history.” It is this dual nature of the Bible that demands of us the task of interpretation.
Because the Bible is God’s Word, it has eternal relevance; it speaks to all humankind, in every age and in every culture. Because it is God’s Word, we must listen — and obey. But because God chose to speak his Word through human words in history, every book in the Bible also has historical particularity; each document is conditioned by the language, time, and culture in which it was originally written (and in some cases also by the oral history it had before it was written down). Interpretation of the Bible is demanded by the “tension” that exists between its eternal relevance and its historical particularity.
There are some, of course, who believe that the Bible is merely a human book, and that it contains only words of people in history. For these people the task of interpreting is limited to historical inquiry. Their interest, as with Cicero or Milton, is with the religious ideas of the Jews, Jesus, or the early church. The task for them, therefore, is purely a historical one. What did these words mean to the people who wrote them? What did they think about God? How did they understand themselves?
On the other hand, there are those who think of the Bible only in terms of its eternal relevance. Because it is God’s Word, they tend to think of it only as a collection of propositions to be believed and imperatives to be obeyed — although invariably, there is a great deal of picking and choosing among the propositions and imperatives. There are, for example, Christians who, on the basis of Deuteronomy 22:5 (“A woman must not wear men’s clothing,” NIV), argue literally that a woman should not wear slacks or shorts. But the same people seldom take literally the other imperatives in that list, which include building a parapet around the roof of one’s house (v. 8), not planting two kinds of seeds in a vineyard (v. 9), and making tassels on the four corners of one’s cloak (v. 12).
The Bible, however, is not a series of propositions and imperatives; it is not simply a collection of “Sayings from Chairman God,” as though he looked down at us from heaven and said: “Hey, you down there, learn these truths. Number 1, There is no God but One, and I am he. Number 2, I am the Creator of all things, including humankind” — and so on, all the way through proposition number 7,777 and imperative number 777.
These propositions, of course, are true; and they are found in the Bible (though not quite in that form). Indeed, such a book might have made many things easier for us. But, fortunately, that is not how God chose to speak to us. Rather, he chose to speak his eternal truths within the particular circumstances and events of human history. This also is what gives us hope. Precisely because God chose to speak in the context of real human history, we may take courage that these same words will speak again and again in our own “real” history, as they have throughout the history of the church.
The fact that the Bible has a human side is our encouragement; it is also our challenge, and is the reason that we need to interpret. Two things should be noted in this regard:
1. In speaking through real persons, in a variety of circumstances, over a 1500-year period, God’s Word was expressed in the vocabulary and thought patterns of those persons and conditioned by the culture of those times and circumstances. That is to say, God’s Word to us was first of all, his Word to them. If they were going to hear it, it could only have come through events and in language they could have understood. Our problem is that we are so far removed from them in time, and sometimes in thought. This is the major reason one needs to learn to interpret the Bible. If God’s Word about women wearing men’s clothing or people having parapets around houses is to speak to us, we first need to know what it said to its original hearers — and why.
Thus, the task of interpreting involves the student/reader at two levels. First, one has to hear the Word they heard; he or she must try to understand what was said to them back then and there. Second, one must learn to hear that same Word in the here and now. We will say more about these two tasks below.
2. One of the most important aspects of the human side of the Bible is that to communicate his Word to all human conditions, God chose to use almost every available kind of communication: narrative history, genealogies, chronicles, laws of all kinds, poetry of all kinds, proverbs, prophetic oracles, riddles, drama, biographical sketches, parables, letters, sermons, and apocalypses.
To interpret properly the “then and there” of the biblical texts, one must not only know some general rules that apply to all the words of the Bible, but one needs to learn the special rules that apply to each of these literary forms (genres). The way God communicates his Word to us in the “here and now” will often differ from one form to another. For example, we need to know how a psalm, a form that was often addressed to God, functions as God’s Word to us, and how psalms differ from the “laws,” which were often addressed to people in cultural situations no longer in existence. How do such “laws” speak to us, and how do they differ from the moral “laws,” which are always valid in all circumstances? Such are the questions the dual nature of the Bible forces upon us.