"can You Interpret The Bible For Yourself?" - 2 Peter 1:20-21 Series

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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.