How can the biblical topics close reason be improved/clarified?

Question

In the Biblical Hermeneutics SE one of the VTC reasons has the following text

Questions about biblical topics but without a specific Bible passage are off-topic as hermeneutical methods cannot be applied when no text is referenced.

This often misleads users who think that if a question doesn't include a specific Bible passage, then it's worth closing. That is not true and the help center explains it well

Questions that do not arise from a Biblical text are off-topic unless they are about hermeneutical approaches. Not sure? You can find much more detail and all the nuances on our meta site.

Up to this point we've not been able to find a better word choice to convey this meaning.

How can the VTC message be written in a way that doesn't confuse users?

P.S. with this question I'm leveraging the power of different communities in helping each others too... it's not the first time (this question in User Experience SE helped this one in Meta SE).

Answer 1

Agreed with observations by others that there is significant overlap between the first two existing reasons:

Questions about biblical topics but without a specific Bible passage are off-topic as hermeneutical methods cannot be applied when no text is referenced.

Questions including a biblical text but that are not seeking an answer about ① the history of that biblical text itself or ② the meaning of that biblical text either in context or through a process of arriving at a particular interpretation of it are off-topic.

Also agreed with dannii's suggestion of merging these two and reusing the other. I'd tweak his and go with something like:

Questions about biblical text interpretation are off-topic which: A) primarily seek current-day application of texts, or B) do not arise from a specific text in its own contemporary context.

Questions about biblical or theological topics are off-topic if they are not seeking an answer about interpretation or the manuscript history of a specific biblical passage, unless it's a question about the field of hermeneutics (hermeneutical approaches).

For the first one, I think it's helpful to have some aspect of 'history' - and for me this hones in on either the manuscript history or the interpretative history of a text.

This second one could use some refining, I think - it would be good to have clearer boundaries around what it means for a question to arise from a text, as I wrote on separately a few weeks ago (but have not had time to follow up on since). It's difficult to be broad enough to allow well-intentioned questions and yet tight enough to restrict questions that are shoe-horned into a text.

Answer 2

There's definitely scope for changing the close reasons. Because actually we have two close reasons for the one single problem:

Questions about biblical topics but without a specific Bible passage are off-topic as hermeneutical methods cannot be applied when no text is referenced.

Questions including a biblical text but that are not seeking an answer about ① the history of that biblical text itself or ② the meaning of that biblical text either in context or through a process of arriving at a particular interpretation of it are off-topic.

These are both about Biblical or theological questions that do not primarily concern the exegesis of a passage. But we have two reasons because of the number of questions posted to this site which do not mention a passage at all, and it's much easier to explain what's wrong with a question if you can say "You're asking about a Biblical topic but we can't do exegesis without a passage!" The second close reason is for when they add a Bible reference but the question still isn't about the passage.

But these close reasons could be combined if we could figure out a better way to phrase them. Let me try this as a rough draft:

Questions about biblical or theological topics are off-topic if they do not primarily concern the interpretation of a specific biblical passage.

Thoughts?

(One advantage of combining these close reasons is that it would free up a close reason for either contemporary application or not-arising-from-the-text questions.)

Answer 3

curiousdannii points out that

One advantage of combining these close reasons is that it would free up a close reason for either contemporary application or not-arising-from-the-text questions.

and I had that in mind when producing this answer (which is actually fruit of a discussion in the comments of that previously linked answer).

Initially I thought it could be substituted to

This question isn't about hermeneutical approaches or history / meaning / interpretation of a biblical text.

but curiousdannii didn't like the hermeneutical approaches and thought the history to be unclear. With that feedback in mind, I've adapted to what o think to be a nice way that would allow us to have only one

This question isn't about hermeneutical approaches or exegesis of a biblical text.

I like the hermeneutical approaches there because that kind of questions aren't as common compared with the exegesis ones.