Mark Vernon exploring the interpretation of scripture by comparing it to interpreting Plato’s Symposium. Of the latter he writes:

It’s impossible finally to decide. There is no one reading of the Symposium that’s definitive. Love, like life, is both of us and beyond us. And this is why the Symposium is a living text, and worthy of comparison with the real Good Book. Ultimately, it’s not rational or even ethical, is not a distillation of wisdom or a consolatory read. Rather, it’s a living text – and hence, like the Bible, has inspired art and further literature, architecture and generations of human beings. It forces us to read between its lines to glimpse something of the mystery of life, and thereby to want to make something of this most tremendous energy in life.

Or, of course, to draw back and flee in the opposite direction.

David Lose, professor of homiletics at Luther Seminary at St. Paul, whose work I regularly engage when preparing my sermons, on the truth of scripture:

the Bible is filled with testimony, witness, confession and even propaganda. Does it contain some reliable historical information? Of that there is little doubt. Yet, whenever we stumble upon “verifiable facts” — a notion largely foreign to ancient writers — we should keep in mind that the biblical authors deployed them not to make a logical argument but rather to persuade their audiences of a larger “truth” that cannot be proved in a laboratory but is finally accepted or not accepted based on its ability to offer a compelling story about the meaning and purpose of the world, God, humanity and everything in between. To attempt to determine whether the Bible is “true” based only on its factual accuracy is therefore to make a profound category mistake, judging its contents by standards its authors were neither cognizant of nor interested in.

And David Steinmetz on the process behind the compilation of the King James Bible.