Double interpretations

[salamacum]

What do people think of double or multiple interpretation of certain passages?

Is accepting this just a cop-out of the problem of perfectly reasonable alternative readings?

I first became aware of this when a preacher expounded to us from old and NT that we were God's people / family / children and used various texts from the OT.
I said but what about Jewish people who only saw those texts as referring to Israel and those messianic Christian Jews or dispensationalists who would not accept those verses as referring to the church.

He just smiled rather patronisingly as if that wasn't a road he was going to go down, nor should I, and said "Oh well, a double interpretation is OK"

Well, is it? Did God DELIBERATELY create a scripture that legitimately could mean 3 things to different people?

Other passages - Matthew 25 - who are "My Brothers"? Israel, the Church or the poor?

The parables in Matthew 13:
birds, leaven - bad things or good?
Is the parable of the mustard seed about a growing, protective, healthy church or a church infested by heresy, compromise and apostasy?
the pearl of great price - Israel, the Church, the Kingdom, the Torah or the gospel?
the merchant - the believer, God or Jesus?
The treasure - Israel, the Church, the Kingdom, the gospel or the Torah?

Do we all just take our pick?
Do we HAVE to decide one way or another?
Do we decide based on whatever interpretation coheres with our belief system?

 

[TwistTim]

When your Usage of Scripture is to prove a point then you can use whatever passage you want to use to do so, it works well for certain types of Ministry like Fake Healers who string together verses in ways not meant so they can look like they are doing the work of the Father.....

Another Interpretation can indeed exist, but it doesn't mean it's right....
You believe that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is about Feminism and how wrong it is.... well that's not even part of the Movie, but you took your presuppositions in with you and saw what you wanted to see, when instead it's a comedy about the Legends surrounding one Arthur Pendragon, King of England.....

So too when we study Scriptures we come with our own mindset wanting to find something to validate our presuppostions, so we can warp a passage to say what it does not say.....

 

[heymikey80]

There are a number of applications that may be made of certain principles reflected in one passage or another.

There's also the possibility that Judaistic interpretation is too narrow. I spent a summer teaching Micah because I thought it would be a great example of this. In Judaic thought Micah is a fairly simple "breaking the Law, getting disciplined for it" kind of book. But when you look more carefully, God is accusing the people of specific sins that break faith with God, that discourage faith among others, that halt God's mercy poured onto those in need, and that essentially destroy the redemptiveness of God's nation.

So there's a depth of communication that's really there -- but there's also the distinct risk that communication has lost its depth when it's tackled by Judaic theologians or even Christian theologians. I've had to look at passages from a variety of angles to conclude what I'm thinking about them.

And I could be wrong too.

Given the large number of counselors, I don't think we should grab hold of all verses and say, "This one interpretation is the only one that we'll use." Because we could be missing something. We could later have to take that back. We're limited people, and our interpretation skills, our ability to unify an interpretation into the breadth of meaning God wants it to be, all that could be beyond us.

God can often "confirm" or "provide earnest" on a promise in one immediate way, and then "close" on that promise centuries later. That's a "typological" interpretation. He promised a seed of promise to Abraham. That seed was Isaac -- and that seed was Christ.

These things can often appear to be multiple interpretations. I'm not sure I'd accuse God of having multiple interpretations of Abraham's promise though. I think they're unified. But it's hard to gather all that together and make sense of it as a unified whole.