Inspiration and Interpretation

It is an indisputable fact that sincere believers throughout history have disagreed about the interpretation of Scripture. Does this mean that God has chosen to inspire the Bible in such a way that mistakes by men and women are allowed? If this is so, we should accept one another’s differences of view and be tolerant. We do not have to rely on Christian history for our examples of disagreement. In Jesus’ day, the people did not understand the Prophets and how they pointed to him. Our question here is not about errors of transmission in the text of the Bible, nor about whether there are discrepancies, contradictions and factual errors. Our question is about the phenomenon of misunderstanding the text.

How do we answer this question? The obvious answer might be to say that we are to blame and the Bible itself is perfectly clear. The counter to this quick answer is that surely God knows our fallibility and shouldn’t he have inspired the Bible to cater for this fact – i.e. made it so clear that there would be no possibility of our making mistakes? This is certainly a point that agnostics would make.

When we say something like ‘God has chosen’ we refer to his intentions and we should therefore supply evidence from his speech that his intentions are ‘thus and so’. We have little direct evidence of God’s speech to draw upon in this matter and we have to infer God’s intentions from what material we have to hand. So, Paul says that Scripture is “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works”. There is nothing obvious here about any intention to be clear, but it is reasonably implied if these other objectives are to have a realistic chance of being fulfilled. (Note also there is nothing about historical readings of Scripture in Paul’s statement.)

Another consideration is this: since the Bible is material conveyed through languages used by human beings, the implication of this is that its text was understandable in its original context. This in turn suggests that the sincere disagreements that believers have had since are at least partly the result of cultural distance. The question then becomes whether God has so inspired the Bible that it can be understood across time. This question is at the heart of a doctrine of Scripture.

There is historical distance between us and the text and the text did originate in a specific socio-historical context. This does not make the text inherently unclear for us unless the data to settle its meaning has been lost; this data (if it has not been lost) will exist in the text itself, the wider literary co-text and the socio-historical context. Has the data been lost and is some part of the text therefore inherently unclear? Perhaps here we might think of, say, a unique Hebrew word for which we have no comparative linguistics – the word is inherently unclear and we will inevitable disagree on its meaning.[1] Consequently, we might say that there will be parts of the Bible here and there – a word, a phrase, a sentence – where the data we need has been lost. The question here is all about the sufficiency of Scripture. Does the interpretation of Scripture require data for its interpretation that has been lost?

While we are talking about ‘the Bible’ as a whole, it is obviously sensible to recognise that we are actually only talking about what sincere believers have disagreed about in the Bible; much of the Bible is well understood without significant disagreement. But has God failed to providentially preserve his text and the data needed to understand it down the ages? It would appear that this is the case if our disagreements are caused by our not having enough data to make the right interpretative decisions. But, we might ask, does the disagreement matter?

Of course, we are discussing this topic as if the disagreements have been the same down the ages and we only have to decide between this or that cause for these disagreements. In reality, the disagreements vary in nature and have different causes. While we might say that we have some disagreements because of the vagaries of history and what is lost to us, this doesn’t mean God has been at fault. He may have preserved the text and the data needed for its interpretation in a fairly full way but not completely. So, we might say that there is all we need for doctrinal understanding and Paul’s other goals (2 Tim 3:16) but some of the Bible is historically obscure.

It is worth emphasizing again that our question is about God choosing something. Has God given us a text that is so clear that any misunderstanding is entirely our fault? What other choices are in play?

God could have chosen to inspire the Bible in such a way that men and women have to search all the Scriptures. One way to encourage a reading practice of searching would be to hide things. The corollary is that you might get lost and not find what it is for which you are looking. Is this a fair thing to have done? The relevant text here is “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.”

This complicates our discussion. In texts things are hidden and this makes the texts unclear to us; we get a sense of this in our reading. This is not unique to the Bible and hiddenness makes us look for answers. Choosing this kind of reading experience and practice for men and women is not choosing an absolute indeterminacy in the text; rather, it is just that men and women may be uncertain about the text when starting out and thus motivated to seek out its meaning. Talking about ‘hiding things’ might be uncharitable. Instead, we might think of the rights of an author to layer meaning in a text and that therefore our disagreements concern deeper levels of meaning. The deeper levels are intentionally hidden; they are necessarily at lower levels underneath the surface grammar of the text. One reason for such a structure in the text would be the need to teach, not just about the needs of the moment, but about a distant future (Christ).[2]

There is no necessary relationship between uncertainty and mistakes. We may be uncertain about something and yet not be mistaken; certainty is a state of mind that can wax and wane. Just because we have to search the Scriptures does not mean that we will make mistakes. But, given that we have to search out answers, we may fail to find them and make mistakes in thinking that we have found them. Our tentative conclusion is that God has chosen for us to be uncertain about things in his Word and to go looking for answers; but he hasn’t chosen to inspire the Scriptures in such a way that we will inevitably make mistakes.

Is hiding (layering) and searching then a reasonable choice for an author? It will keep us reading and it helps us to read all of the Scriptures. It seems to have pedagogic merit. This changes the kind of conclusion we can draw from our opening question: this is simply that the difficulty we might see in a biblical text and our disagreements over interpretation are not the fault of God; we cannot pass the blame to God. Our sincere disagreements arise because in our endeavor to search out answers as to what the text means, we are making different mistakes amongst ourselves at the same time as, hopefully, having the right answer within the wider community.[3]

People might still say that the Bible is just inherently ambiguous and lacking a clear meaning. This is why there are disagreements. There is a further problem with this view. Certainly, there is ambiguity here and there, but such ambiguity is an aspect of meaning and part of the careful determinate design of an author unless, that is, the author is a careless and inattentive writer, which is not the case for the Bible. The same point applies to whatever it is that we do not know about a text in the Bible, provided the answer has been intentionally placed within the Bible rather than it being in the broader socio-historical context. With an omniscient God as the author, it is difficult to find fault with the text except insofar as men have corrupted it through its transmission.

Someone might say that the scale and the character of the misunderstandings that sincere men and women have had about the Bible shows that there is something wrong with God’s choice of text; we can’t just say that this is all down to us or socio-historic data that is lost to us. The problem, so it could be said, lies in the use of symbol, typology, parable, allegory, and other literary devices that are perhaps not plain and literal. For example, doctrinal disagreements exist based on different readings of Paul’s use of typology. To make this point in a different way, someone might also say that the prevalent use of poetry and figures of speech is a causal factor in our misunderstanding.

These features of the Bible are well in evidence in other literary texts and dealt with in school education. It is therefore an odd complaint to say that they are the cause of our misunderstanding. The same general answer applies that we have already given: they are reasonable features that an author might include in his/her text, especially if the searching of that text for layers of meaning is the aim. We might add that if repeated reading and discussion of the text is also God’s aim, then there will be a liberal use of these kinds of features. Further, given that God understands his audiences, there is every reason to suppose that he has not sought to be obscure in his use of language. If someone complains about the unclear literary features of a text, they are probably failing to search out the relevant meaning in the wider literary context of the Bible. A text with the more advanced uses to which language can be put (allegory, typology, figure, poetry) is inevitable if it is to be dense. Layers upon layers of meaning are likely in a text written with genius and inspired by the divine Mind.

We have said that a different point that gets made in this topic is that our misunderstandings arise because there are numerous discrepancies and contradictions in the Bible. This is often the sceptic’s charge. One example of a book in this area has 473 pages of explanation of such alleged discrepancies and contradictions.[4] Maybe there are some examples here, and we would have to look at specific cases, but in general we actually understand the alleged discrepancies and contradictions – it is just that we don’t know how to reconcile the conflicting information. The fact is that there are plenty of books that purport to ‘explain’ such alleged discrepancies and contradictions.

To sum up what we have argued for so far: there may very well be socio-historical data now lost to us that explains some texts in the Bible, but the majority of disagreements we have and the mistakes we make arise from failures on our part to search the Scriptures and make the right comparisons of spiritual with spiritual. We cannot blame God for this because it is not unreasonable for an author to require his/her readership to search their writing for answers to questions of interpretation.

This area of thinking that we are considering is a deep one, although it may not look that way. It’s about subjectivity and objectivity in interpretation.

A final facet of our problem is the nature of religious language. Some philosophers say that religious language is inherently metaphorical and not literally true. A traditional problem in theology is to explain how talk about God is meaningful and the usual answer is to say that we use metaphor, simile and analogy in our God-talk. However, if we are an image of God, our description of ourselves with regard, say, to our action, is an ‘image’ of what it is for God to act. Ascribing intentional action to God is therefore validated by this fact. This takes away the charge that all talk of God is meaningless or needs to be understood metaphorically.

If we are an image, then our talk of ourselves is ‘imaging’ talk; there is therefore a correspondence in such talk to the reality of God (manifest in angels^[5]). We ourselves are in a relationship of correspondence to God, as we might say that truth is correspondence to reality. Our capacity for language is part of this image, and insofar as our words pick out us—such as our intentions, thoughts, and actions—they also pick out God. So, for example, ‘love’ as it is used of us, can equally be used of God, even if we want to say that our love is a pale reflection (image) of God’s love.^[6] It is a moot point whether we then say that our language is literally applied to us but only metaphorically applied to God. It is arguable instead that an image is subordinate to the original and that our language is metaphorically applied to us and that we are a live metaphor of God. It depends on what you want to do with the terms ‘literal’ and ‘metaphor’ – we are doing theology here and not linguistics.

To sum up our discussion, we can say that we have been concerned with whether something is missing for our Bible understanding and whether this is the cause of disagreement down the ages between Bible readers and students. Anything that God has put into the Bible for understanding is ipso facto not missing, but the Bible books were not written in a vacuum. Maybe there is socio-historical data that is now missing which we need to understand some of the things written in the Bible. However, given that God intended Scripture for different audiences down the ages, and given that the original socio-historical data needed for a contextual understanding of a text can be subsequently lost, it makes sense for an author to have included some framework(s) for understanding Scripture within the body of Scripture. This implies that such a framework would have hermeneutical priority for us as we go about understanding a text, with the external socio-historical data that has come down to us taking a second place. The deeply rooted mistake in the historical-critical method is to have set aside this priority. What shows this to be the case is the example of the NT which does not offer historical interpretation of the OT beyond what can be read from the surface of the text; it offers, rather, Christ-centred interpretation. The method of interpretation employed by the Christian prophets is not an historical one, sensitive to socio-historical contextual information, but an intertextual one in which Scripture is combined with Scripture in the illumination of the Christ-event.