Question #1
cultural distance, geographical distance and distance of language. Offer an argument for
which challenge is the easiest to overcome and which is the most difficult. Be sure to define
the challenge and to clearly identify the problems inherent in it.
In my opinion the distance of culture is the most difficult to overcome. Webster defines culture
as the behaviors and beliefs characteristics of a particular social, ethnic, or age group. The
culture of the people of today is so different from the culture of the people of the bible. One such
difficulty resulting from the cultural distance is the understanding that many of our modern
cultural values and priorities could affect our interpretation and cause us to assign a meaning that
is not in the text at all (Klein,15). Simply stated when we read scripture we read it through the
lenses of our modern culture. For example in 1 Timothy 2: 9-10 Paul exhorts the women to
“dress modestly” One could think that Paul is talking in terms of sexual modesty, but most
women in that culture almost never wore clothes that were sexually provocative. The context of
the scripture suggested that Paul was telling the Christian women not to flaunt their wealth by
wearing expensive clothes and jewelry. The distance of culture offers an enigma of problems
when comes to interpretation as people seek to understand the true meaning of a text.
In my opinion language would be the distance to overcome. Biblical interpretation is challenged
by the language gap between biblical writers and our own (16). This could be difficult but with
the availability of various resources that translate and interpret different languages makes this
distance a lot easier to overcome.
Four Challenges for Bible interpretation are listed in you text—the distance of time,
Question#2
Throughout the history of the bible, allegorical methods have been employed as a means to
discover a “hidden meaning” in the text. Outline the use of allegorical approaches and
discuss the benefits and pitfalls of utilizing such an approach to interpret Scripture today
The quest to find a deeper meaning to scripture first originated with a Jewish philosopher named
Philo. For him a Bible passage was like a human being; it had a body (literal meaning) and a soul
(allegorical meaning). (Klein, 26) He believed that the allegorical method could reveal the true
inner meaning that God had encoded in them (26). He developed his own set of rules, in his view
one could disregard the literal meaning of a scripture if it said anything unworthy of God or
contained some insoluble difficulty or involved an obvious allegorical expression. The allegory
method of interpretation was revived at the Alexandrian School by Clement of Alexandria who
taught from A.D. 190 until 203. He like Philo held that scripture has a twofold meaning. Biblical
text had a body which was the (literal) meaning and the soul which represented the (spiritual)
meaning. In Clements’s view he held that a text’s literal sense only pointed to a deeper spiritual
truth (39). Origen who was Clements successor would later introduce a third element arguing
that just as humans have a body , soul and spirit that scripture should have a threefold meaning.
(39) He added the “moral “ element, suggesting ethical principles can be gotten from an
allegorical understanding of certain passages.
He According to Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart “a text cannot mean what it never meant”, or
put another way, the true meaning of the Biblical text for us is what God originally intended it to
mean when it was first spoken. (Fee, 30) They argue that representative ideas taken from
symbolic text in the Bible should not be used as doctrine. The allegorical approach is very
helpful in uncovering mysteries of spiritual reality and making Biblical ideas applicable to
today’s culture but it has one glaring weakness and that is its subjectivity. (Klein,39).
Klein, William W., Craig L. Blomberg, Robert L. Hubbard. Introduction to Biblical Interpretation.
Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2004.
Fee, Gordon D., & Douglas Stuart. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. 3rd ed. Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003.
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