The art of biblical interpretation: Inspiration and interaction

In my first post I argued that we can’t read the Bible ‘just like any other book’, because it is God’s word, and in my second I unpacked the doctrine of inspiration, and how that must shape our attitude towards reading the Bible. This post looks further to see that we only understand the Bible when we know the God who composed it.

Inspiration and knowing God

Since God is the author of Scripture, we can’t understand it apart from knowing him. One of the principles of reading any document is that some knowledge of the source is necessary to understand it. Each year I teach a subject at Christ College on the Westminster Confession. We spend some time on the history of the Westminster Assembly and learn a bit about some of the members. As we do, the document comes alive for students. Not only are they more sympathetic toward it, but it starts to make sense to them. It no longer feels like arid theological legislation. What is the case in reading a merely human document is even more so with God’s word. Apart from God, the Bible won’t make sense.

The apostle Peter expresses this in the negative when he discusses people who distort Paul’s writings and other Scriptures. While he admits that Paul writes some things “that are hard to understand”, the reason these people distort the message is because they are “ignorant and unstable” (2 Pet 3:16). These are the false teachers Peter warns about, who deny the Lord, indulge in shameful ways, are greedy and arrogant, follow corrupt desires, and despise authority. They do not understand what they are talking about because they refuse to know God truly, despite their obviously religious rhetoric (2:1-3, 10-15, 18). This is the archetype of misinterpreting the Bible. Their failure is not that they lack education or the ability to read. Refusing to know the Author, they distort the words. This is the source of almost all serious misreadings of the Bible.

There is a circularity here. We come to know God through the Bible, yet we have to know him in order to read it. The circle is not closed. It simply means that a growing knowledge of God, through his word, leads to a growing grasp of his word. That is one of the reasons why Bible reading is a life-long adventure. It also means that we must seek a deeper knowledge of God as we read the Bible. Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians—that through the Spirit, God would enable them to know him better and receive his light to grasp the hope and power which is theirs—is the right prayer for every Bible reader (Eph 1:17–19).

Inspiration and our response

The doctrine of inspiration calls us to take whatever we find in the Bible and to respond to it appropriately, because we recognize it as God’s word to us. When the Westminster Confession describes Christian faith, it says faith means that a Christian “believes to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word” based on the authority of God who speaks in it. This expresses the word-focused nature of Christian faith. The Confession explains that it means “yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God” (WCF 14:2).

JI Packer makes a similar point in his discussion of inerrancy. He says that knowing that the Bible is God’s true word implies that:

We should never (1) deny, disregard, or arbitrarily relativize anything that the Bible writers teach, nor (2) discount any of the practical implications for worship and service which their teaching carries, nor (3) cut the knot of any problem of Bible harmony, factual or theological, by allowing ourselves to assume that the writers were not necessarily consistent with themselves or with each other.¹

Stating the same thing positively, he says he must “bind myself in advance to follow the method of harmonizing and integrating all that Scripture declares, without remainder, and taking it as from God to me”.²

The conviction that the Bible is God’s word rules out picking and choosing which parts we accept. Whatever we come to understand is the meaning of the Bible is God’s meaning, and we receive it as that.

This certainly doesn’t mean that my interpretation (or anyone’s interpretation) is identical with God’s meaning in the Bible. An inspired Bible does not imply inspired readers. Because the Bible is God’s book with his meaning, then we are not free to impose our meaning on it. Rather we should be very concerned to find God’s meaning. The doctrine of inspiration does not avoid the need for us to work to understand the Bible; it motivates that work.

So the doctrine of inspiration teaches us to know God and seek his meaning as we read the Bible. The final post on the doctrine of inspiration will be about the unity of meaning in the Bible.

1. JI Packer, Beyond the Battle for the Bible, Cornerstone, 1980, pp. 51-52.↩

2. p. 53.↩