Creative Misreading

A common theological trick is to quote one line of scripture and then expound upon its “true meaning” for an hour until the audience no longer can remember the original words. In this way the text can be co-opted to suit any purpose. No one seems to question this embarrassing method of finding scriptural truth. On the contrary, this method of creative misreading is frequently used by fundamentalists who claim (without any apparent irony) that there is only one correct, literal reading of scripture.