Check out Christianity Today’s interview with my colleague David Weaver-Zercher, co-author of The Amish Way: Patient Faith in a Perilous World. Here is a taste:
Your book points out that an Amish education is limited to eighth grade, so there are no Amish Bible scholars, at least none with degrees from theological schools. Is it a fair criticism to suggest that Amish interpretations of certain Bible principles and passages are simplistic?
I would not call Amish approaches to the Bible simplistic. Rather, they are both traditional and pre-modern. That is, their biblical interpretations are firmly rooted in their community’s history of interpretation, and their conclusions have not been affected by modern and postmodern interpretive methods. My colleague Steve Nolt says that the Amish sometimes take a “wisdom” approach to reading the Bible, finding particular applications through metaphorical readings of the text. One example is [the passage], “God separated light from darkness,” which the Amish interpret to mean that the church and world should be separate. In general, they demonstrate a pre-modern, non-systematic, non-literal interpretive approach that is more akin to medieval allegory.
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