Everyone who goes to seminary is taught the discipline of hermeneutics--the art of interpretation. The way people interpret the Bible has always fascinated me. Why does one person understand a passage one way, and another person comes out with a totally different understanding?
Over the years I've studied hermeneutics quite a bit. The Reformed Tradition that I have been part of has laid down specific principles of interpreting Scripture. But Presbyterians can't agree on the interpretation of certain texts in the Bible. All Baptists don't agree. All Methodists have disagreements. Not to mention Protestants and Catholics, etc.
Of course almost every pastor says that he/she is asking the Holy Spirit to guide their understanding of the Bible. So, here is pastor A asking the Spirit to show him the meaning of a particular passage. And here is pastor B asking the same Spirit to guide her in her study of the same passage. And they come out with different interpretations. If I assume that both pastors are genuinely honest about wanting the truth and are sincerely asking the Holy Spirit for illumination, how am I to explain the different results?
One day many years ago a heretical thought dawned on me. Either the Holy Spirit is a trickster, or the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with it.
I came to the conclusion that our Christian claims of being directly illuminated by God cannot be literally true. Assuming our sincerity and our openness to God, the only other conclusion would have to be that the Holy Spirit is not reliable.
It feels good to believe that God is actually giving us inside information. But it ain't so. No one has a direct line to God. We are simply fallible and biased human beings trying our darnedest to make sense out of the texts that we have received from our tradition. There is no inerrant Bible; and there is no inerrant interpretation of the Bible. We claim too much if we continue to believe in a magical illumination of Scripture.
There certainly are important hermeneutical principles to follow when studying the Bible, such as: allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture; looking at the immediate and wider context of a passage; using the collective wisdom of a particular tradition and the broader Christian tradition; being aware of our own biases; situating a passage within its historical and cultural context; recognizing literary forms and genres; etc. But after all is said and done, we can only give it our best shot, then admit that we are bound to get it wrong some of the time.
My advice is this: always mistrust a preacher or teacher of the Bible who seems absolutely sure that he/she is right. John Calvin said that there are three important characteristics of a good theologian: humility, humility, and humility. Unfortunately, old John didn't follow his own advice.
There is one thing I am fairly certain of: a person of faith cannot be too certain.
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