Why is the Bible ambiguous?

[jayem]

No one can deny that the Bible is subject to widely differing interpretations due linguistic factors. I've seen opposite meanings derived from the same passage depending on how a word or phrase is translated. For believers, this should be more than just an academic concern. Different understandings of the Bible is perplexing, and is one of the reasons that Christianity has split into so many denominations. (And back in the bad old days, people could be imprisoned, or worse, for teaching or publishing unorthodox Bible doctrines.)

So why would God allow this confusion because of language? This may sound fatuous, but why would we need translations at all? If the Bible is of divine origin, why wouldn't God use his supernatural power to make it crystal clean and unambiguous to every reader, no matter what his native language?

 

[FireDragon76]

So why would God allow this confusion because of language? This may sound fatuous, but why would we need translations at all? If the Bible is of divine origin, why wouldn't God use his supernatural power to make it crystal clean and unambiguous to every reader, no matter what his native language?

Divine inspiration doesn't necessarily mean divine dictation.

 

[mickey30981]

No, divine inspiration is not dictation, you are right. But that does not answer the question. The bible also says that God is not a God of confusion, but rather order. The answer is that Christ established a Church and the Church brought us the bible. But the bible was not given to replace the Church or interpret the Church. The Church interprets the bible and the bible was evidence, or agreement about what the Church believed and practiced already. The bible itself says the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth. This then begs the question , "what is the Church?" Thats a whole other issue, but the fact is that the Church is needed as the foundation or bulwark to the truth, including the truth in the bible.

 

[Resha Caner]

No, divine inspiration is not dictation, you are right. But that does not answer the question. The bible also says that God is not a God of confusion, but rather order. The answer is that Christ established a Church and the Church brought us the bible. But the bible was not given to replace the Church or interpret the Church. The Church interprets the bible and the bible was evidence, or agreement about what the Church believed and practiced already. The bible itself says the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth. This then begs the question , "what is the Church?" Thats a whole other issue, but the fact is that the Church is needed as the foundation or bulwark to the truth, including the truth in the bible.

Lutherans would basically agree with this. The Bible was not meant to be thrown into a void - without context - and provide unquestionable clarity. No book is meant to do that. Reality requires dealing with people's imperfections. It would be an interesting discussion if there is an unbeliever who thinks there is a book that can do that.

That's why I always chuckle when unbelievers shove a verse under my nose with, "But it says right here ..." as if the Church is unaware of what the Bible says. Sure, you can find uniformed individual Christians. But the Church knows the Bible.

It's similar when certain people quote mine biology literature and claim disagreements among biologists prove how untenable evolution is. If disagreements among biologists don't make evolution untenable, then disagreements among Christians don't make the Bible untenable.

I faced a similar dilemma with the Koran. I see all kinds of problems with that text, but I choose not to use that as a point of contention with Muslims. I ask them how they interpret it, and I base the conversation on their interpretation, not on whatever problems I might perceive in the text. It would be nice to receive the same consideration.

 

[PsychoSarah]

No, divine inspiration is not dictation, you are right. But that does not answer the question. The bible also says that God is not a God of confusion, but rather order. The answer is that Christ established a Church and the Church brought us the bible. But the bible was not given to replace the Church or interpret the Church. The Church interprets the bible and the bible was evidence, or agreement about what the Church believed and practiced already. The bible itself says the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth. This then begs the question , "what is the Church?" Thats a whole other issue, but the fact is that the Church is needed as the foundation or bulwark to the truth, including the truth in the bible.

But this is a problem, as ultimately humans interpret the hinge differently and it results in chaos and conflict.

 

[Received]

This quote by Frederick Buechner summarizes pretty well my view of the Bible:

There are still more reasons [for not reading the Bible]. The barbarities, for instance. The often fanatical nationalism. The passages where the God of Israel is depicted as interested in other nations only to the degree that he can use them to whip Israel into line. God hardening Pharaoh's heart and then clobbering him for hard-heartedness. The self-righteousness and self-pity of many of the Psalms, plus their frequent vindictiveness. The way the sublime and the unspeakable are always jostling each other. Psalm 137, for example, which starts out "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept" and ends "Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" Or Noah, the one man left worth saving, God's blue-eyed old sailorman, getting drunk in port and passing out in a tent where his son Ham beholds his shame. Or the book of Deuteronomy, where there are laws thousands of years ahead of their time, like the one that says a newly married man is exempt from military service for a year so "he can be happy with the wife whom he has taken," side by side with laws that would make Genghis Khan blush, like the one that says Israel is to destroy conquered peoples utterly, making no covenants with them and showing no mercy. Or even Jesus of Nazareth, the same Jesus who in one place uses a Samaritan of all people—a member of a hated tribe— as the example of a man who truly loves his neighbor, and in another place is quoted as telling a Canaanite woman who came to him for help that it was not fair for him to throw the children's food to the dogs.

In short, one way to describe the Bible, written by many different people over a period of three thousand years and more, would be to say that it is a disorderly collection of sixty-odd books, which are often tedious, barbaric, obscure, and teem with contradictions and inconsistencies. It is a swarming compost of a book, an Irish stew of poetry and propaganda, law and legalism, myth and murk, history and hysteria. Over the centuries it has become hopelessly associated with tub-thumping evangelism and dreary piety, with superannuated superstition and blue-nosed moralizing, with ecclesiastical authoritarianism and crippling literalism. Let them who try to start out at Genesis and work their way conscientiously to Revelation beware.

And yet—

And yet just because it is a book about both the sublime and the unspeakable, it is a book also about life the way it really is. It is a book about people who at one and the same time can be both believing and unbelieving, innocent and guilty, crusaders and crooks, full of hope and full of despair. In other words, it is a book about us.

And it is also a book about God. If it is not about the God we believe in, then it is about the God we do not believe in. One way or another, the story we find in the Bible is our own story.​

 

[FireDragon76]

But this is a problem, as ultimately humans interpret the hinge differently and it results in chaos and conflict.

This is true for every human endeavor, not just religion. The fallibility of human beings is a basic Christian doctrine about the human condition.

 

[quatona]

Why is the Bible ambiguous?

Because "...freewill...".

 

[2PhiloVoid]

No one can deny that the Bible is subject to widely differing interpretations due linguistic factors. I've seen opposite meanings derived from the same passage depending on how a word or phrase is translated. For believers, this should be more than just an academic concern. Different understandings of the Bible is perplexing, and is one of the reasons that Christianity has split into so many denominations. (And back in the bad old days, people could be imprisoned, or worse, for teaching or publishing unorthodox Bible doctrines.)

So why would God allow this confusion because of language? This may sound fatuous, but why would we need translations at all? If the Bible is of divine origin, why wouldn't God use his supernatural power to make it crystal clean and unambiguous to every reader, no matter what his native language?

God has made His Word 'vague' and kept some information hidden, because He knows He can't trust us to completely follow through in faith.

We like to 'say' that if we only had all the information for a coherent understanding, then we could believe.

We like to 'say' that if the information we do have would just be made clear, then we would follow unswervingly with sagacious commitment.

We like to 'say' that if God would just give us the hidden things of His mind and the definitive love of His heart, then we would love Him in return with eternal passion.

The truth is that we are often "treacherous" human failures and often find opportunities to "transgress" even when the things we think we want most are given to us. (Isaiah 48; Matthew 12 & 13)

And we sit, and sit, contemplating our bittersweet fate...and complain.

 

[juvenissun]

No one can deny that the Bible is subject to widely differing interpretations due linguistic factors. I've seen opposite meanings derived from the same passage depending on how a word or phrase is translated. For believers, this should be more than just an academic concern. Different understandings of the Bible is perplexing, and is one of the reasons that Christianity has split into so many denominations. (And back in the bad old days, people could be imprisoned, or worse, for teaching or publishing unorthodox Bible doctrines.)

So why would God allow this confusion because of language? This may sound fatuous, but why would we need translations at all? If the Bible is of divine origin, why wouldn't God use his supernatural power to make it crystal clean and unambiguous to every reader, no matter what his native language?

You should be amazed that with this degree of difficulty in the understanding of the Bible, it is still the most effective book to unify the faith. How does the Bible do that? May be this should be your real question.

 

[durangodawood]

Why is the Bible ambiguous?

Because its dozens of books written over many centuries by a variety of authors.

 

[Standing_Ultraviolet]

The Bible is ambiguous because, to put it bluntly, it's not one book with one author or even one intention.

The earliest books of the Bible were built off of even older oral stories passed down probably from the 2nd millennium B.C.E., when they developed in a broader near-eastern milieu. The latest books were written during the Roman imperial period, with a very different mix of influences informing their authors. Over that time, Israelite religion changed dramatically and became much more internally cohesive.

You can't really expect a set of books written over that sort of time span not to be ambiguous. It would be like what would happen if a set of people living at around the time when the Avignon Papacy began were to put down an oral history dating back to the divided Carolingian Empire, and their collection of literature were finished ninety years from now.

 

[bhsmte]

No one can deny that the Bible is subject to widely differing interpretations due linguistic factors. I've seen opposite meanings derived from the same passage depending on how a word or phrase is translated. For believers, this should be more than just an academic concern. Different understandings of the Bible is perplexing, and is one of the reasons that Christianity has split into so many denominations. (And back in the bad old days, people could be imprisoned, or worse, for teaching or publishing unorthodox Bible doctrines.)

So why would God allow this confusion because of language? This may sound fatuous, but why would we need translations at all? If the Bible is of divine origin, why wouldn't God use his supernatural power to make it crystal clean and unambiguous to every reader, no matter what his native language?

Furthermore, if the bible is divinely inspired, why wouldn't God assure the originals were preserved? Instead, we have copies of copies of copies.

 

[Ana the Ist]

No one can deny that the Bible is subject to widely differing interpretations due linguistic factors. I've seen opposite meanings derived from the same passage depending on how a word or phrase is translated. For believers, this should be more than just an academic concern. Different understandings of the Bible is perplexing, and is one of the reasons that Christianity has split into so many denominations. (And back in the bad old days, people could be imprisoned, or worse, for teaching or publishing unorthodox Bible doctrines.)

So why would God allow this confusion because of language? This may sound fatuous, but why would we need translations at all? If the Bible is of divine origin, why wouldn't God use his supernatural power to make it crystal clean and unambiguous to every reader, no matter what his native language?

"So why would God allow this confusion ...."

Why ask why? The answers are quite clear I think...

1. God doesn't want mankind to understand the bible correctly. This of course, begs the question of why he would want it written in the first place.

2. Perhaps god made some mistakes and the bible didn't turn out the way he intended. Perhaps all this infallibility business is just self-aggrandizing hype...I mean, consider the source.

3. God likes a good laugh and the whole "word of god" business is his way of getting a laugh. Imagine teaching a monkey how he should act in his little monkey community. You know he'll never get it, but it's going to be amusing watching him try.

4. God is actually evil...or least kind of a jerk. He deliberately wants people to fail to understand it, get it wrong, or worse...teach it incorrectly to others. He does this because he wants to punish them.

5. It's incomplete. God sat down to get this done...got bored...and decided to do something else like make another universe. It's missing some key parts that would make the whole thing make sense.

6. It's a test. God wants to see who thinks for themselves and who just follows along, no matter how nonsensical what they're following seems. The only way to pass the test is to disregard the whole thing...like some big cosmic riddle.

I actually asked this same question long ago after I first got on CF, and I didn't get any logical answers either. It doesn't really make any sense does it. If you believe...

-god is good
-god wants mankind to know his will
-god is capable of communicating with man
-god is infallible
-god wants man to understand his word
And finally....
-the bible is the word of god

If you believe all those things, there really should be no miscommunication when a person reads the bible. Everyone should walk away with the exact same message as everyone else. Clearly, this isn't the situation. I've heard all the standard explanations for "why" as well. To say these explanations are underwhelming is putting it lightly. It's amazing how much christians will credit to god, a being they think is capable of creating the universe and all of life...and yet when it comes to putting his word down in a book he suddenly becomes as inept as the three stooges.

 

[ebia]

No one can deny that the Bible is subject to widely differing interpretations due linguistic factors. I've seen opposite meanings derived from the same passage depending on how a word or phrase is translated. For believers, this should be more than just an academic concern. Different understandings of the Bible is perplexing, and is one of the reasons that Christianity has split into so many denominations. (And back in the bad old days, people could be imprisoned, or worse, for teaching or publishing unorthodox Bible doctrines.)

So why would God allow this confusion because of language? This may sound fatuous, but why would we need translations at all? If the Bible is of divine origin, why wouldn't God use his supernatural power to make it crystal clean and unambiguous to every reader, no matter what his native language?

Human learning is an ambiguous process.

If all the bible needed to do was to transmit some simple factual abstract information then it could be less so, but texts that transform the way people think cannot be unambiguous.

 

[DogmaHunter]

That's why I always chuckle when unbelievers shove a verse under my nose with, "But it says right here ..." as if the Church is unaware of what the Bible says. Sure, you can find uniformed individual Christians. But the Church knows the Bible.

You are aware that different denominations have different establishments of this "church", right? You're not answering the question. Most christians get their interpretation handed to them by their "church".

It's similar when certain people quote mine biology literature and claim disagreements among biologists prove how untenable evolution is. If disagreements among biologists don't make evolution untenable, then disagreements among Christians don't make the Bible untenable.

The difference is, off course, that no book in science is held up as the one and only truth.

I faced a similar dilemma with the Koran. I see all kinds of problems with that text, but I choose not to use that as a point of contention with Muslims. I ask them how they interpret it, and I base the conversation on their interpretation, not on whatever problems I might perceive in the text. It would be nice to receive the same consideration.

Well, sure. But it doesn't change the fact that denominations / churches all wave the same book, yet all believe different things.

 

[DogmaHunter]

You should be amazed that with this degree of difficulty in the understanding of the Bible

Or... a desperate attempt to make sense of nonsense.

it is still the most effective book to unify the faith

Thousands of different denominations disagree.

How does the Bible do that? May be this should be your real question.

It doesn't. Not any more then any other religion.

 

[FireDragon76]

The difference is, off course, that no book in science is held up as the one and only truth.

I cannot speak for all Christians... but the major groups of Christians (Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists Orthodox, Presbyterians) do not believe the Bible is the "one and only truth". What you are attacking is simply not recognizeable, to me, as a Christian.

 

[Resha Caner]

The difference is, off course, that no book in science is held up as the one and only truth.

This is irrelevant. You're missing the point.

How can an imperfect being recognize perfection? truth?

 

[bhsmte]

This is irrelevant. You're missing the point.

How can an imperfect being recognize perfection? truth?

That's one way to look at it, to provide some excuse for trying to reconcile the book with reality.