Since this has already been addressed ad nauseam elsewhere in meta, I will merely quote from other posts.
From "How can we educate new users before they post bad answers?":
BH.SE works best when there is self-conscious awareness and
consistency in the language used in its Q&As:
- historical questions require historical
responses
- linguistic questions require linguistic responses
- literary questions require literary
responses
(The links come from academic sites, and are simply intended to convey
the sense that these disciplines each have their own language, set of
assumptions, criteria for validity, etc.) These are, probably, the
three main types of Q&A that work best at BH.SE. On the other hand:
- religious
- theological/doctrinal
- ethical
- liturgical
aspects need to be handled as facets of the biblical
texts
studied by participants of BH.SE in historical, linguistic, and
literary terms, and not as aspects of personal conviction, or the
belief and praxis of historic and contemporary faith communities (for
which see the Mi Yodeya and
Christianity Stack Exchange
sites).
From "A helpful flowchart for asking questions on BH.SE":
Does your question arise from and focus on the text (and not primarily on those things to which the text applies)?
- A new guideline for doctrine in questions. What do you think? — "Questions are on topic if they are focused on
the text, rather than things to which the text may apply.... Questions
that seem to be seeking to apply the Bible are off-topic."
- How can we educate new users before they post bad answers? — "We don't do 'Bible study'—we study the Bible.... We
stop short of application when answering questions about the Bible
(which means we don't fully exegete the text in the religious sense of
the practice)."
- How should we handle historicism? — "...questions about whether entity X is the true fulfillment of Prophecy Y are
off-topic, unless the answer can be determined exegetically.... "bad
questions" ask for an identification that cannot be made from the
text. To answer these, the interpreter must go beyond the text and
decide that some entity from history did (or will) fit the bill well
enough to conclude that this is the true interpretation of the
prophecy. The problem is that these interpretations are so varied and
depend so much on which hermeneutic you follow (and what your
presuppositions are) that the answers can hardly be called
exegetical."
From "Does truth have any place on BH? If so, what is its place and how might it be worded so as not to offend unnecessarily?":
...there are other places on the web that welcome modern religious
interpretations of texts that focus primarily on absolute
truth—this is simply not that place. We offer something
different.
