"Can You Interpret the Bible for Yourself?"

What should you do when the experts say the Bible says one thing, but to you, it seems to say something else? Should you go with the experts? Or rely on your own judgment?

What Does 2 Peter 1:20-21 Mean?

2 Peter 1:20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever driven by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were driven by the Holy Spirit.

No prophecy of Scripture ever came about by the prophet’s interpretation of his own visions. The visions came from God and so did the interpretation. The Holy Spirit drove the prophets in such a way that, even though they wrote from their own heart, communicating what they wanted to say to their intended audience, the Spirit saw to it that everything they wrote was God’s Word, down to the letter.

No Private Interpretation?

I told you last time that I’d give you a defense for my interpretation of v.20 and this whole topic of private interpretation of Scripture. And this is important, because it has to do with the way you read your Bible.

Many people take v.20 to be talking about the reader, not the writer. I told you verse 20 is about the writers of Scripture. No prophecy was a matter of the prophet’s own interpretation of his visions. But others take it to be about the reader. They say it means no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of the individual reader’s own interpretation. The old King James translates it, “No prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation.” The Catholic Church took that to mean you can’t interpret the Bible for yourself. You have to defer to the interpretation of the church authorities. Whatever they say the passage means, that’s what it means, and if you don’t see it, you’re just wrong.

Context

I have a long footnote in the manuscript giving some reasons why I reject that view,[1] but the main reason is the context. Individual interpretation of the Bible has nothing to do with what Peter is saying. Just look at the rest of what he says right after v.20. It’s a “not this but that” statement—“Not v.20, but instead, v.21.” So v.20 has to be the opposite of v.21.

So if this is about private interpretation, you’d expect v.21 to be the alternative. It would say something like, “No prophecy of Scripture is a matter of private interpretation, but rather of church leadership interpretation.” But v.21 doesn’t say anything like that. It doesn’t give an alternative to private interpretation of the Bible.

What it does do is give an alternative to human origin of the Bible. Verse 21 says, “No, prophecy came from God, not men.” So if v.20 is describing the opposite of that, it has to be about whether the Bible had human origin, not about how we interpret it today. It wouldn’t make any sense to take all that to mean, “You have to defer to others when you interpret the Bible. Why? Because prophecy came from God.”[2] But it does make sense for Peter to say, “Prophecy didn’t come from the prophets’ own ideas. Why? Because all prophecy is from God.” So it’s not about corporate vs. private interpretation. It’s about divine rather than human origin of the Scriptures.

You can look at the footnote if you want all the other reasons why I’m convinced of this interpretation. I believe that other interpretation is not only wrong, but dangerous.

The Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox

The Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox have taken this to mean individual people can’t interpret the Bible on their own—they need to defer to church authorities for that. If you just let individuals interpret the Bible on their own—they’ll come up with all kinds of crazy doctrines. That’s why, prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church kept the Bible in Latin, so common people wouldn’t be able to read it. They said, “Just trust us—we’ll tell you what it says and what it means.”

How did that work out? All that church corruption, like indulgences where you pay the priests for some advance forgiveness so you can go out and commit a sin—they just said, “Trust us—that’s in the Bible.” The real power that fueled the Reformation was when Martin Luther just unleashed the Bible to speak for itself. He translated the whole thing into German—the common language of the people. And they read it and said, “Wait a second—all that stuff you’ve been telling us—that’s not in there!” If it weren’t for private individuals breaking from the official pronouncements and interpreting the Bible for themselves, we never would have had the Reformation.

In the modern Catholic Church, it’s not as bad. They say it’s fine for individuals to read and interpret the Bible, but they still say if you ever come up with an interpretation that conflicts with the church officials, you’re wrong and they’re right. So you’re free to interpret the Bible as long as what you come up with is always exactly the same as their interpretation. You can think for yourself all you want as long as you agree with us.

A friend of mine who used to be an evangelical decided to join the Eastern Orthodox church a while back, and this was one of his reasons. He said in evangelicalism, it’s a free-for-all, and you get countless different denominations. It’s so much cleaner to just have one final authority tell you, “This is the right interpretation.”

But there are a couple problems with that. First, how do you decide whether to go with the Catholic authorities or the Eastern Orthodox? Who makes that decision? You, the private individual. My friend made that call on his own, deciding the Catholic church was wrong and the Eastern Orthodox was right. Based on what? On Scripture? So you’re right back to individual, private interpretation. The individual either has to decide for himself what the Bible means, or he has to decide for himself which group to accept as the authority on what the Bible says. So you can’t escape the necessity of private interpretation.

User-Defined Meaning

Now, there are others who say, “We don’t buy into the Catholic or Orthodox ideas, but still, we think the passage is talking about the reader. What Peter’s saying is, ‘When you read the Bible, it doesn’t just mean whatever you feel like it means.’” People go around the circle in a Bible study and say, “Here’s what this verse means to me.” And someone else says, “Here’s what it means to me.” And everyone nods and says, “Amen” even though the two interpretations are contradictory.

You’re not at liberty to just make the Bible mean whatever you want it to mean. That’s for sure, but is that what Peter is saying here? It’s definitely what Peter says in ch.3.

2 Peter 3:16 … [Paul’s] letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

So we’re not free to distort the Scriptures. The Bible does not mean whatever you feel like it means. It only means what the original author was trying to convey to the original readers. That’s all it means, that’s all it will ever mean; the Bible can never mean what it never meant, because the meaning doesn’t change.

So I agree with this concept for sure, but is that what Peter means here in this verse? No, because that’s not what he’s talking about in context.

God Holds Individuals Responsible

You can’t make up your own meaning for Scripture, but you must interpret the author’s intended meaning in Scripture. You can’t pass that responsibility off to church authorities. God holds individuals responsible for following his Word regardless of what church leaders are saying. Church leaders have often been wrong, and when they have, God still holds individuals responsible for not following them in their errors.

At the time of Jesus, all the theological authorities were interpreting the Old Testament in all kinds of wrong ways. They said you were to hate your enemies and if you devote your money to God then you don’t have to use it to honor your parents and that messianic prophecy pointed to someone very different from Jesus, so Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah. And when the common people fell for those wrong interpretations, what did Jesus say? Did he say, “Don’t worry—it’s not your fault. You did the right thing in deferring to the interpretations of the authorities”? No. Luke 24:25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!”

God holds you, individually, responsible for coming up with the right interpretation of Scripture. And you can do it.

1 John 2:27 … the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But … his anointing teaches you about all things

Never Go Against What You See in the Bible

Always remember, when Judgment Day comes, you’ll be standing alone. Your pastor, your dad, your favorite theologian—none of them will be standing next to you. If God says, “I said this in my Word and you disregarded it,” you won’t be able to say, “Well, pastor so-and-so said that’s not what it meant.”

You read the passage, it seems to be saying X, but the guy on the radio says it means Y. All your friends say it means Y. Your pastor agrees it means Y. If that happens, then you need to recheck your work, search hard, listen to their arguments with an open mind—do all you can to see if you can see what they are seeing in the Bible.

But if you do all that and you still don’t see it, then don’t accept it. Don’t ever, ever say, “Well, I can’t see it in the Bible, but I trust that expert more than I trust my own knowledge, so I’ll just go with his view.” Don’t ever do that. Until you can see it for yourself in the Bible, do not accept it.

Summary

2 Peter 1:20 is often taken to mean that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of the reader’s own private interpretation. The RCC and Eastern Orthodox hold that all interpretation must be deferred to the church authorities. Even if that were the case, the individual still has to decide for himself which authorities to trust, and then he has to interpret the pronouncements of those authorities. So there is no escaping individual interpretation. And when authorities get it wrong, God still holds individuals responsible to get it right. Never accept an interpretation that you can’t see for yourself in the Bible. The private interpretation take on this passage doesn’t fit the immediate context. The alternative given in v.21 is not to defer to the authorities. It’s about the origin of Scripture. So the meaning is that Scripture didn’t originate through the prophets’ interpretation of their own visions, but all Scripture came from God.

[1] A simple word-for-word translation of v.20 comes out like this:

“Above all, know that no prophecy of Scripture is of one’s own interpretation.”

Most commentators take this to mean prophecy is not subject to the individual interpretation of the reader because, it is argued, it would be grammatically awkward for the term “one’s own” to refer to the prophet. Richard Bauckham, in the WBC volume on 2 Peter, provides a compelling argument that the apparent awkwardness of “his own” referring to the prophets is not a problem because there are other examples of the term being used this way.

I believe instead of “no prophecy of Scripture is,” it should be translated “no prophecy of Scripture came about.” The Greek word (γίνεται) could mean simply “is,” but the meaning “arises, comes about, derives from” is common (“far more common” according to NET notes). The only difficulty is that to take ἐπιλύσεως as a genitive of origin would normally, after γίνεσθαι, require the preposition ἐκ (Rom 1:3; Gal 4:4; 1 Tim 6:4). But according to Bauckham, “This is perhaps the weakest point in the case for this interpretation, but the meaning ‘arises from’ with the simple genitive cannot be said to be impossible. On either view, the force of the genitive is somewhat unusual.”

[2] Some might argue that corporate interpretation is more likely to be of God than private interpretation, but that’s reading quite a bit into the text. In fact, it’s reading what would be the main point into the text. Nowhere does Peter indicate that corporate interpretation is more divine or Spirit-driven than private interpretation.

 

[1] The reason Israel turned away from God was because of a memory problem. God warned them over and over—Don’t forget what it was like to be slaves, and don’t forget what I did to deliver you.” And what happened?Psalm 78:11 They forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them. They forgot everything God told them to remember. But they did remember one thing. Numbers 11:5 We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost– also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. They forgot the misery of their bondage. But they remembered the food.

[2] From ch.7.