Does the Holy Spirit help us understand the Bible? I got these comments over the last few days:
– “I personally do not interpret it I allow the Holy Spirit to interpret it.”
– “The Bible is not up for interpretation. 2 Peter 1:19-21”
– How do you interpret the Bible? “I don’t, the spirit does”
Well, that’s not good! So let’s work on this a minute.
Inspiration of Scripture
In order to understand Bible interpretation, we first must talk briefly about what happened when the Bible was written.
The Holy Spirit inspired the writing of the Bible (2 Tim 3:16). And the way the Spirit did that was to use individuals who had different personalities and different vocabularies and different styles to do the writing.
Here is why that matters, especially in the New Testament – if you read Greek you become quickly aware that different authors have the three things I said above (different personalities, vocabularies and styles).
The Holy Spirit allowed people to be people in the recording of scripture. It wasn’t Holy Spirit dictated outside of who they were as people. John writes differently than Paul than Peter, etc.
What we have (theoretically) in the autographs (originals – they don’t exist that we know of) would be perfectly inspired scripture through very real humans that the Spirit allowed to be themselves in the writing and still come away with 100% truth.
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Translation
In between the authors and modern readers are the translators.
God used translators to translate the scriptures into words we can read without having to learn Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. I don’t believe the Holy Spirit dictated the translations, just like I don’t believe the Holy Spirit dictated the writing of the Bible.
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On the other end of the communication are billions of people across time, space, culture and language who read the Bible…mostly from translations into our own languages. This includes us.
When we read the Bible, like the writers/authors and translators…we too read it with our own personalities. We read it within our culture. We read what the translators gave us and must interpret it.
***There is no reading without interpretation***
For Example:
You look at an email and the first word you see is in the Subject and it is the word “chair”
Lightning fast thought – why is Matt emailing me about a chair? Does he need to borrow one?
That’s interpretation.
You read further to see the full subject line – “I went to the university and met with the department chair”
If you know anything about universities you know that is the head of the department. If you have 0 familiarity with universities you might be confused as to what this means…what department? Do they only have one chair or am I missing something?
All of that is interpretation and all you have so far is one sentence.
You read the body of the email and if you already know the terminology it all makes sense but if you don’t, getting more context from reading the whole email will help you figure out this is a person and you will probably figure out they have some authority based on what the email actually says in the body.
That’s all interpretation.
And it has a human component.
But what people try to do is remove the human component of how it was written, remove the human component of how it was translated and EVEN remove the human component of how they read it and just say that there is no interpretation involved.
I believe they believe this because they have run into bad interpretation so they think they are rightfully rejecting something bad to be able to say they just read it and understand it – but you don’t go from read to understand without interpretation. Interpretation is what makes us understand.
I hope this helps you understand that there is no reading and understanding without a human (you) component. Otherwise we would all have perfect agreement as the Spirit shows us all the exact same understanding.
Now, back to the question – does the Holy Spirit help us understand the Bible?
I believe the Holy Spirit can help us better understand the Bible while also allowing us autonomy, to keep our personality, etc. The Holy Spirit is not going to upload first century Jewish cultural understanding into your mind or give you perfect knowledge of Greek/Hebrew.
The Holy Spirit can work with us (still being fully who we are – as with the biblical authors) to help us understand the Bible. I pray the Holy Spirit helps me understand the Bible. And I also acknowledge that that doesn’t make my view infallible because the Spirit does this in coordination with my imperfection, cultural lenses, etc.
Thoughts on this?
