“Sola Scriptura!”  That’s the Latin wording for “Scripture Alone!” a popular slogan of the Reformer, Martin Luther, who broke from the Catholic Church in the 1500’s.  OK. Actually, he didn’t break from them. They kicked him out. And they kicked him out (among other reasons) for a disagreement over how to read the Bible. Supposedly, Luther’s followers (commonly called Protestants and more often today called Evangelicals) believe we can read the Bible for ourselves without the Pope or some other clergyman explaining to us what the Bible really means.

If you are an Evangelical, you probably agree with me so far. You are saying to yourself, “Of course we can read the Bible for ourselves. God’s word is very clear. God said it. I believe it. That settles it!”

Well, just stay with my article. I submit that most Protestants do not really believe this at all.  They should, but they don’t. They approach the Bible in ways very similar to the Catholics. They may swear up and down a totem pole that the Bible is sufficient but don’t you believe them for a second because, for the most part, Protestants still maintain a Catholic mentality.

Have you ever been to a Bible study? Before it begins, somebody opens in prayer, maybe the teacher, maybe some one else from the group. The prayer goes something like this: “Lord we ask that your Holy Spirit open up our eyes and our hearts as we turn to your word, so that we may understand your teaching.”

Please know, I do not get upset with people for making this prayer because it’s an innocent prayer. Nevertheless, this prayer speaks volumes about their beliefs. Are we of the opinion that the Bible cannot be understood unless the Holy Spirit first does some kind of miracle and tells us what it means? This is the way Mormons talk about the Bible and Christians jump all over them for it. Mormons say the Bible is too spiritual to be understood. The only difference is they believe the Holy Spirit explains the meaning through Joseph Smith or another of their prophets. And, of course, this is also the Catholic mentality, that church councils, church clergy and church traditions interpret scripture.

Allow me to pose a simple question: If the Bible is really so mysterious, if its meaning is so hidden, why did God bother to give it to us in the first place?  Why not just allow us to follow any opinion we want about His will and message?

Now, at least Catholics and Mormons respect the Bible. Some, with less respect, take a similar approach. “Hey, man, the Bible can be interpreted a hundred different ways.”

Usually that means there’s a passage they don’t like, (something about sin, hell or judgment perhaps), and they would be absolutely delighted to reinterpret these “mysterious verses.”

Such discussion about interpretation also brings us dangerously close to the belief that some portions of the Bible are “more inspired than others.”

Whenever I hear this kind of comment, I ask the following question:  “OK, what is your objective standard for deciding which passages are inspired and which aren’t, aside from disregarding the passages you don’t like?”

Mark Twain (no Christian by any way, shape or form) was at least honest enough to admit that he wasn’t bothered about the scriptures he didn’t understand. He was bothered about the ones he did understand!

“But Bob, I’ve seen passages which are honestly difficult to understand. Isn’t there some interpretation necessary when it comes to reading the Bible?”

It all depends on what we mean by interpretation.  If we mean that the Bible is a collection of different manuscripts, two-thousand years old (New Testament) and over three-thousand years old (Old Testament) written in different languages and handed down from cultures much different than our own, yes, of course we must interpret. But the science of studying ancient manuscripts is an objective process. We call this field of study Hermeneutics.  Obviously, if one does not know what a Pharisee or Sadducee is, a lot of Jesus’ words and admonitions in the gospels will make no sense.  It is also important to know that in ancient Greek (the language of the New Testament) there were many different words for love and we translate with only one English word.  The Bible is also a wide variety of writing styles because the Bible is not merely one book. It is a collection, a small library, if you will, of 66 separate documents. Some of them were written as poetry. Some of them were written as history.  Some are letters from the apostles. These letters (for the most part) do not contain teachings because they were written to the churches as reminders of things that had already been taught when Paul, Peter and others were with the communities in person. We must compare several of these letters before understanding the teachings of the apostles.

Hermeneutics studies language, culture, context, corroborative historical documents that were contemporaries of the Bible and writing style. We do not read a book of poetry like Psalms or Proverbs the way we would read a letter like Romans or a history book like Acts. When the Psalmist talks about trees clapping their hands, I do not take it literally because, again, I am reading a poem. But when Paul talks about sin, I do take it literally, Yes,, all of this is interpretation but it is objective interpretation: It seeks an answer to the question, “What was the original writer intending to say and what did his original audience understand him to mean?”

On the other hand, if what we mean by interpretation is, “The Bible says whatever I want it to say,” that is bogus. I would also dismiss the more sincere (but no less misguided) belief that the Bible is mysterious and we need some prophet to explain it to us or we need the Holy Spirit to enlighten us. That belief smacks into the face of God’s whole purpose in providing the Bible. We have a God who speaks clearly, who wants us to know His will, who does not give us codes and secret messages. His own word tells us we need no outside interpretation:

“Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

1 Peter 1:20-21

See?  The Holy Spirit already spoke when the scripture originated. He does not need to speak again to tell us what He said.

We do not throw away the rules of literary criticism simply because we are reading from a book called, “The Word of God.”  Yes, the Bible is spiritual in its inspiration. It is also spiritual in its application. Without the help of the Holy Spirit, we would not be able to apply the Bible to our lives. But as for merely reading it? A Christian, a Buddhist and an Atheist should all be able to read the same passage of scripture and agree as to what it says.  I’m serious. Oh, sure, they may disagree as to whether or not they like it, they may disagree as to whether or not they believe in it and they may disagree as to whether or not they plan to obey it. But they should agree as to what it says. When Paul greets the Corinthians, are we to pray over the meaning to see if he was really greeting the Galatians?

“What about parables?”

Parables were very simple stories with one basic moral message. Put in the context of Jesus’ linear teaching, it is not too difficult to understand a parable’s meaning. It is true that this unusual teaching method made the point a little less apparent at first.  This was a method of communication that provoked thought instead of just handing the truth on a silver platter. A seeking disciple would understand the meaning of the parable.  On many occasions when we stumble into the parables of Jesus, all we have to do is keep on reading and sooner or later we see Jesus’ band of merry men asking him what the parable meant. And then Jesus tells them what it meant! This isn’t rocket science. Look at the parable of the sower and the seed (Matt. 13). After the disciples ask Jesus to explain, He gives an extremely detailed explanation. The seeds are the word of God. The birds are Satan, etc. There is no doubt whatsoever of His meaning and it leaves no room for additional interpretation. So even New Testament parables are not beyond our ability to understand.

It may interest you to know that the idea of a secret hidden meaning in the Bible was unknown to the Jews until after Jerusalem was conquered by Alexander the Great. After that, everything changed, because the Jews found themselves living in a Greek dominated world.  This means the Jews eventually approached their literature the way the Greeks tackled theirs. In Greece, it was legally dangerous to not believe in the gods of Mt. Olympus, even though many Greek citizens (especially those who loved philosophy) found the stories of Zeus, Athena, etc. to be pretty nutty. But they figured out a loophole, a loophole that saved their lives and their sanity at the same time. They decided to “look beneath the surface” of Homer (author of The Iliad, practically the Greek Bible). If one could understand the stories of the Greek gods properly, one would see that they were really teaching Platonic philosophy.

Around the time of Jesus, a Jewish teacher named Philo lived in Alexandria (one of the chief centers in the world for the Greek way of life).  Philo grew up on the Hebrew Bible but had also fallen in love with Greek philosophy. Not feeling the freedom to dismiss the scriptures, he felt the same conflict between Moses and Plato that the Greeks had felt between Homer and Plato. This led to the idea that the Bible had hidden meaning and this hidden meaning bore a remarkable resemblance to Greek philosophy. By the time Philo was finished, Abraham was a Stoic philosopher who sought Sarah (meaning “wisdom”) and traveled to the land of Haran, which means “holes” and stands for the incompleteness of approaching life through the senses alone.

In time, Greek ideas were dismissed by the Jews but the idea of symbolic, hidden meanings to scripture remained. We have a whole body of Jewish literature that has survived to this day, called The Midrash. It contains the words of many rabbis explaining what various passages of scripture “truly mean.”

The rest is history: Christianity grew out of Judaism and this method of interpretation, this idea that the Bible has some mysterious message beneath the surface, has never been completely shaken. It continues to this day.  One must wonder how we would read the Bible today if Alexander had not conquered the western world. Thanks, Alexander!

Years ago, in a college poetry class, we were each asked to write a Haiku. Here is what I wrote.  See for yourself how brilliant it sounds.

Eternal breeze,

Bellows with dusty madness,

Crying, “I am lost.

It was so fun to listen to my fellow students attempt to interpret my humble, yet profound, little poem.

“It makes serious statements about society today.”

“It’s an allegory about man’s search for meaning.”

Allow me to apply some hermeneutics: What the original author meant to say is the only meaning. What did I mean to say when I wrote that poem?  Nothing!  Absolutely nothing!

This is Bob Siegel, making the obvious, obvious.

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