Every generation interprets the Bible for itself.
In some quarters, even this initial proposition is perilous. But if it’s so with works of literature, why not the Bible? If Moby-Dick is wordy nonsense in one generation (“The first thing which must be said of Melville,” wrote Leonard Woolf in 1923, “is that he writes the execrable English”) and a great work of art the next, isn’t it possible to find the same shifting of responses in the case of the Bible? Of course, there’s already a tremendous range of beliefs among biblical interpreters at any single moment. For example, what to make of the conflicting interpretations of the Book of Revelation in the Middle Ages and after? What to make of the writings known as the Apocrypha, canonized by Catholics but not by some Protestant branches of the Christian Church? And if there’s this range of interpretations in an age, why not between generations?
–Rick Moody
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