Interpreting the Bible

I had a friend some time ago who loved to argue the Bible, and whenever we got to a certain point, he would say Well, the Bible says what it means and it means what it says. Of course, he usually fell back on that statement when his point was weak. And he didn’t really believe it—not the way he intended it to be taken—because he was kind of suggesting that when it suited him the Bible was to be taken literally, and when it didn’t suit him then it didn’t necessarily have to be. But in fact we