Don't Demand Your Own Interpretation of the Bible (C.S. Lewis)

A reason why I think Christians should not insist on a particular, precise, specific, narrow interpretation of Scripture or biblical doctrine, and then use it to question any other contrary interpretation or perspective or practice: "...then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it" (Eccl 8:17).

This is what C.S. Lewis wrote in Reflection on the Psalms. It is wordy and somewhat confusing and convoluted but well worth our effort to try to comprehend what he says about the Bible. He’s basically saying not to come to the Bible with predetermined notions of what it needs to be.

“We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an un-refracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form — something we could have tabulated and memorized and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist’s view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic’s view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done — especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.

“We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, foolproof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answers to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He used paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the ‘wisecrack.’ He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be ‘got up’ as if it were a ‘subject.’ If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, ‘pinned down.’ The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.”