Via Lynn, a post written from a Jewish perspective on interpreting the Torah/Bible:

Those of us who study seriously, and those of us who do not reject the plain facts of history, are forced to acknowledge that the Bible as we know it is a complicated amalgamation of texts, edited and organized by imperfect human beings, frequently in the service of imperfect human purposes. It is a huge collection of books, containing a great range of perspectives, a great range of agendas, which frequently contradict one another.

One response to this is to say that if Torah bears the marks of the hands of human beings, if it cannot be said to be an inerrant divine document, then there is no point at all, and all interpretations are arbitrary. Another is to argue that, contradictions and gruesome horrors aside, the Bible is nonetheless the perfect and infallible word of God. Perhaps those who believe the latter are willing to believe that God is a hypocrite; more likely, they’re willing to turn a blind eye to difficult passages, willing to excuse themselves from the obligation of study, willing to quote passages to others when it’s convenient but not willing to struggle with difficult passages themselves.

But there is a third response: We can accept that the Torah has been edited and organized by human beings, and is therefore incomplete and imperfect — and we can simultaneously hold that the Torah contains the word of God, and that study can allow us to contemplate and draw closer to God.

The author disclaims any application of this to Christianity, but I’m inclined to agree with several of her commenters that it’s very relevant.

Even though it was obviously written over a much shorter period of time, the New Testament contains multiple perspectives on the meaning of Jesus, not all of them obviously compatible. It further says things that seem to contradict some of what we now know (or believe). Add to this the fact that Christians include the “Hebrew Bible” among sacred scripture and you’ve got a big, unwieldy collection of literature bursting with different (though related) takes on who God is and what God is up to.

I think everyone, whether they admit it or not, has a “canon within the canon” that they use to interpret and prioritize other parts of the Bible. For Luther, the Bible was the manger in which Christ lay, and Christ was the key to understanding scripture. He found the message of God’s grace most forcefully set forth in Romans and the Gospel of John, among other places, and used this as a yardstick of sorts for making discriminations (including his notorious judgment that the Epistle of James was a “letter of straw”). This moves us away from seeing the authority of the Bible in some textual property like innerrancy and toward seeing it as belonging to the message (and, maybe, the fruits this message produces in people’s lives?). There’s obviously a kind of hermeneutic circle here, but not necessarily a vicious one. After all, the Bible as we know it owes its existence to the church, which itself is a creature of the proclamation of the Gospel.

Personally, the more I read the Bible, the more I rejoice in the different perspectives there. It’s liberating to let go of the impulse to organize it into some architectonic theological structure where every book and passage finds its neatly assigned place. The real Bible (as opposed to the mythical Bible that’s often used as a theological or political bludgeon) is a lot messier and more interesting than that. Recognizing this can allow for an ongoing dialogue or dialectic where different parts of the Bible challenge and provoke us, instead of being absorbed Borg-style into a predigested theology. At the same time, though, the core proclamation of God’s grace and liberation in Jesus can provide assurance that the God we encounter in Scripture is one who is for us and whom we can trust, even in the midst of passages that are baffling, challenging, or even offensive.