Scripture, meaning and the reader. A Christian reflection in two parts
Scripture has meaning that exists independently of the reader’s preferences. Our responsibility is to discover that meaning faithfully, allowing the text, its context and the wider witness of Scripture to govern our understanding.
I supposed I knew my Bible,
From “When I Read the Bible Through” by Amos Russel Wells
Reading piecemeal, hit or miss,
Now a bit of John or Matthew,
Now a snatch of Genesis,
Certain chapters of Isaiah,
Certain Psalms (the twenty-third!),
Twelfth of Romans, First of Proverbs
Yes, I thought I knew the Word!
But I found that thorough reading
Was a different thing to do,
And the way was unfamiliar
When I read the Bible through.
Amos Russel Wells’s “When I Read the Bible Through” is worth reading in full. He describes a reader who was sure he knew his Bible from favourite chapters, a few passages from the Gospels and the twenty-third Psalm. Then he read it from beginning to end and found it a different book. The Old Testament came alive, and each prophet stood out with a character of his own.
Bring a cup of tea and the whole chapter. The verse has been doing a remarkable amount of work on its own. Take a sip before we put it to work again. Someone at the table has already said it: “Well, that’s just your interpretation.” It sounds humble, and sometimes it is. It can also end a conversation more neatly than any argument could. Speculate with me. If everybody has their own interpretation, does the Bible still say anything we did not bring to it ourselves? And how does a verse read when we put back the sentences we usually leave behind?
The truth inside the phrase
There is truth in that sentence. Readers do interpret differently. Some disagreements come from the difficulty of ancient languages. Some come from history we only partly know. Some come from the beliefs we carry into the room, and some because the text leaves things less explicit than we would like. Augustine addressed this problem in On Christian Doctrine. Yet the fact that people disagree tells us only that people disagree. It does not tell us that every reading is equally faithful.
If six people read the same passage and come away with six contradictory explanations, their disagreement cannot tell us which reading is faithful. We still have to test each explanation against the passage.
The shade here falls on a habit found in every tradition: lifting a verse out of its chapter, asking it to carry a sermon by itself, and calling any objection “just your interpretation.”
What the Bible expects of its readers
Scripture itself assumes that understanding can be sought, taught, tested and corrected.
When the Law is read aloud in Nehemiah 8, the Levites read from the book and “gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8). Reading and understanding are two different things, and someone has to help close the gap.
In Acts 8, Philip hears an Ethiopian official reading Isaiah and asks, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The man acknowledges that he needs guidance. He asks for help. Philip begins with that very passage and tells him the good news about Jesus (Acts 8:30–35).
In Berea, people listen to Paul and examine the Scriptures daily “to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). Even an apostle’s preaching could be checked against the text. Timothy is told to handle the word of truth rightly (2 Timothy 2:15), which only makes sense if it can also be handled badly.
None of these passages lays out a full method of Bible study. Together they picture readers who can be helped, tested and corrected. That picture assumes the text has something to say that a reader can miss.
A verse that cannot carry the whole load
Many of us learned 2 Peter 1:20 in the King James Version: “no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation” (KJV). It is often quoted against anyone who reads the Bible their own way.
Read the next verse before using it that way. Peter goes on: “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). This gives us reason to read verse 20 as a statement about prophecy’s origin: the prophets did not invent their message. Richard F. Wilson takes another approach in the Smyth & Helwys commentary, 1 & 2 Peter, Jude (2010, pp. 321–322). He reads verse 20 as a defence of the apostolic interpretation of prophecy concerning Christ’s return, and verse 21 as an affirmation that prophecy comes from God. The passage’s wording and argument must be considered together.
These readings differ over whether verse 20 concerns the origin or the interpretation of prophecy. Both must account for verse 21 and the defence of the apostolic witness in verses 16–19. The passage cannot, by itself, settle every question about how readers interpret Scripture. It certainly gives us no warrant to make personal preference the measure of truth. God’s word did not start as somebody’s bright idea.
Something there to twist
A few chapters later, Peter speaks directly about reading. He admits that some things in Paul’s letters are “hard to understand.” The Bible gives us permission to say, “This passage is difficult.” In the same breath, Peter warns that “the ignorant and unstable twist” those letters, “as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16). He places the problem in the readers: untaught and unsteady. That word “twist” matters.
A text can only be twisted if there is something there to distort.
The verse does not promise that every hard passage can be reduced to one tidy sentence. It says something more modest and more useful. Difficulty does not make meaning stretch forever. Some readings do violence to what was written.
What the church has said
The Reformed tradition states the principle clearly. The Westminster Confession says that Scripture interprets Scripture. When a passage’s “true and full sense” is uncertain, readers should turn to passages that speak more plainly. It explicitly describes that sense as “not manifold, but one” (chapter 1, section 9). The same chapter acknowledges that all things in Scripture are not equally plain or equally clear to everyone (section 7). Definite meaning does not guarantee easy understanding.
Augustine gives readers several ways to test an interpretation. When wording is ambiguous, he directs them to the rule of faith, the church’s received understanding of Christian belief, which he says is gathered from clearer passages of Scripture and the authority of the church. Where more than one reading agrees with that faith, the surrounding context helps readers decide between them (On Christian Doctrine, Book Three, chapter 2). He also uses clearer passages to explain obscure figurative language, while warning that the same image need not mean the same thing everywhere (chapter 26). Readers should seek the biblical author’s intended meaning, yet Augustine allows several readings when other passages of Scripture support them and they agree with sound doctrine (chapter 27). His position allows greater interpretive plurality than Westminster’s account of a passage’s one true and full sense. The reader’s freedom remains accountable to Scripture and the church’s faith.
Thomas Aquinas explains that Scripture has a literal sense, what its words communicate according to the author’s intention, and spiritual senses that rest on it (Summa Theologiae, First Part, Question One, Article Ten). The literal sense includes figures of speech: the “arm of God” refers to God’s power. Because God is Scripture’s author and comprehends everything at once, Aquinas also allows several meanings within the literal sense of a passage. He insists that theological arguments be grounded in the literal sense and that anything necessary for faith conveyed through a spiritual sense is taught plainly through the literal sense elsewhere. Westminster, Augustine and Aquinas therefore differ on how many senses a passage may bear. All three require grounds for interpretation beyond the reader’s preferences. Scripture’s depth does not make every proposed reading valid.
When the Bible reads the Bible
Sometimes Scripture itself shows us how deep a passage runs.
In Hosea 11:1, God says, “out of Egypt I called my son.” In Hosea, the son is Israel, brought out of slavery in the exodus. Matthew identifies those words as fulfilled in Jesus’ time in Egypt and return from it (Matthew 2:15). Faithful reading honours both: what Hosea meant for Israel, and what Matthew sees in Christ, who carries Israel’s story in his own life. Matthew does not give later readers a licence to attach any meaning they like to Hosea. The connection is made by Scripture itself.
On the road to Emmaus, the risen Jesus begins with Moses and all the Prophets and interprets “in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Christian reading centres on Christ. It is still reading. Jesus gathers what is already written.
Meaning, significance and application
For this discussion, it helps to distinguish three questions. These are working distinctions; Christians do not all use the terms in exactly the same way.
- Meaning asks what the words communicate in their own setting.
- Significance asks how that passage fits within the whole Bible, including the way later Scripture uses it.
- Application asks what faith, worship, obedience or wisdom the passage asks of us here and now.
Applications can multiply. The command to love your neighbour has countless faithful applications in a hospital, a classroom, a council meeting or a kitchen. That does not make “love your neighbor” capable of meaning “despise your neighbor.”
The same care protects verses we like to quote. “God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33) sits inside Paul’s instructions about orderly worship. It is a poor proof that sincere Christians must never disagree about a passage. Paul’s point is concrete: when the church gathers, its worship should be orderly.
Leave the Bible open
Leave the Bible open a little longer. We have heard that the passage says something; now we have to consider what our reading permits us to do. Does that reading still hold when it asks something difficult of us?
Part Two turns to the harder question. When something other than Scripture begins to govern our reading, does that help the church or hinder it?
Continue to Part Two Who governs the reading?
Bibliography and Translation Note
Biblical quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV), unless another translation is identified.
Aquinas, T. (1964). Summa theologiae: Vol. 1. Christian theology (T. Gilby, Trans.). Blackfriars; McGraw-Hill; Eyre & Spottiswoode. See First Part, Question One, Article Ten, pp. 37–41.
Augustine. (2009). On Christian doctrine (J. F. Shaw, Trans.). Dover Publications. See Book Three, chapter 2, pp. 80–82, and chapters 26–27, pp. 103–104.
Brotherson, D. (2021). Contextualization or syncretism? The use of other-faith worship forms in the Bible and in insider movements. Pickwick Publications.
Maroney, E. (2006). Religious syncretism. SCM Press.
Vinson, R. B., Wilson, R. F., & Mills, W. E. (2010). 1 & 2 Peter, Jude. Smyth & Helwys Publishing.
Wells, A. R. (n.d.). When I read the Bible through. Poetry Explorer. https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem26.php?pid=10139711
Westminster Assembly. (2011). The 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith and subordinate documents with the Authorized Version (C. M. McMahon & T. B. McMahon, Eds.). Puritan Publications. See chapter 1, sections 7 and 9.