On Saturday night America lost the greatest defender in a generation of the original meaning of the constitution in Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Those will be huge shoes to fill.

I also will miss his razor sharp whit and creative ability to turn a phrase along with the way he would go after whoever was arguing before the court to defend a point rationally. Every time an opinion was delivered from the Supreme Court, I always wanted to see what Scalia had written because I knew his opinions would be rooted in the text of the constitution (i.e., textualism or originalism) instead of the prevailing cultural winds of our day (sometimes refereed to the “living and breathing document approach”).

That is a lesson that Christians and non-Christian alike need to learn when it comes to the Bible. The approach of Justice Antonin Scalia to the constitution is the same one we need for interpreting the Bible.

[Tweet “”Interpretation is one but application is many. We confuse this distinction at our own peril.””]

The meaning of a text does not change in every generation. It’s application can (more…)