The Bible Is Not the Same Thing as My Reading of It
A high view of Scripture doesn’t mean treating your interpretation as infallible — and confusing the two has done a lot of damage.
Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:16–17; 2 Peter 1:20–21; James 1:19; Acts 17:11; 1 Corinthians 13:12
There’s a move that gets made in Christian conversation often enough that it usually goes unnoticed.
Someone says, “The Bible clearly says…” and then offers a position. The position might be on sexuality, on women in leadership, on baptism, on the end times, on any number of contested questions. The phrase “the Bible clearly says” is doing important work in that sentence. It’s claiming that what follows isn’t an interpretation. It isn’t a tradition. It isn’t one possible reading among several. It’s just what the Bible says. To disagree with it would be to disagree with the Bible itself.
The problem is that most of what follows the phrase isn’t actually what the Bible says. It’s what a particular reader, in a particular tradition, has understood the Bible to mean. And the difference between those two things — between Scripture and my reading of Scripture — is one of the most important distinctions in Christian thought.
Collapsing them has caused enormous damage.
The distinction that matters
Scripture has authority. The church has always confessed this. The Bible is the word of God, the witness to Christ, the rule and norm of faith and life. It stands over the believer and the church, not the other way around.
But the Bible doesn’t read itself.
Every encounter with Scripture is also an act of interpretation. The reader brings a language, a culture, a tradition, a set of assumptions, a particular life. The text gets engaged through all of that. Even the most “plain” reading of a passage is already an interpretation — it’s already been filtered through assumptions about what counts as plain, what counts as relevant, what counts as the obvious meaning.
This isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s just how reading works. The honest move isn’t to pretend interpretation isn’t happening. The honest move is to recognize that it is, and to distinguish between two things that can otherwise get confused:
Scripture itself, which has absolute authority for the Christian. My reading of Scripture, which is always provisional and subject to correction.
When someone says “the Bible clearly says,” they’re usually conflating those two things. They’re treating their reading as if it had the same authority as the text. That conflation is the problem.
Why this matters
If my reading of Scripture has the same authority as Scripture itself, then to question my reading is to question Scripture. There’s no space between them. To disagree with me is to disagree with God.
That position has features that make it attractive. It produces certainty. It clears away the messiness of weighing different interpretations. It makes faith feel solid.
It also makes correction impossible. It makes humility impossible. It makes growth impossible. It turns every disagreement into a battle for the authority of Scripture itself, when most disagreements among Christians are actually about how Scripture should be read.
And it produces something the church has had to live with again and again: confident interpretations, held by serious Christians as the obvious meaning of the text, that later generations have had to repent of.
What the church has had to revisit
The history of Christian biblical interpretation is full of confident readings that required reconsideration.
The church was confident, for a very long time, that slavery was biblically permitted. The reading drew on passages where slaves are addressed, where slavery is described, where Paul writes to Philemon about Onesimus without simply demanding the slave be freed. American slaveholders — including pastors and theologians — argued passionately that abolitionists were the ones departing from Scripture. The position was held confidently, with extensive biblical citation, by serious Christians.
The church was confident, for centuries, that any remarriage after divorce was ongoing adultery, full stop. The reading was based on real words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. The position was held with such confidence that it broke families, excluded people from communion, and shaped marriage law across the Christian West. Most theologically conservative Christians today have moved off that position — not because they care less about Scripture, but because they’ve come to read those passages differently.
The church was confident, for a long time, that charging interest on loans was a serious sin. The reading was based on real biblical texts in both testaments. The position shaped centuries of Christian economic ethics. Almost no Christian today, including those committed to a high view of Scripture, holds this position in its original form.
In each case, the church didn’t change Scripture. The texts are still there, exactly as they were. What changed was the reading — the recognition that earlier confident interpretations had been carrying cultural assumptions the texts didn’t actually require.
The recurring pattern is the same. A reading is held with certainty. Anyone who questions the reading is treated as questioning Scripture itself. Real harm is done to people on the receiving end of the certainty. Eventually, careful Christians go back to the texts and find that the confident reading was doing more work than the words could actually support.
If this happened once in church history, it could be dismissed as an anomaly. It has happened repeatedly. It is happening now, on questions the church is still working through. The honest position is to expect it will happen again, on questions our generation hasn’t yet recognized.
This is not a claim that Scripture is unreliable, that interpretation is impossible, or that every reading is equally valid.
What this is not
Scripture really is authoritative. Some readings really are better than others. Careful work on a passage produces more reliable understanding than careless work. The text really does have meanings the author intended, even when those meanings require care to recover.
What’s being claimed is something more specific. Scripture’s authority is one thing. The infallibility of my interpretation is something else. A high view of Scripture doesn’t require — and actually doesn’t allow — treating my reading of it as if it shared that authority. The church has always held both that Scripture is the rule of faith and that the church’s reading of Scripture is always being refined, corrected, deepened.
This is not a modern relativist move. It is the actual position of the Reformation, which held that the church reformed by Scripture must always be reforming — semper reformanda. It is the position of every serious theological tradition that takes Scripture seriously enough to keep going back to it rather than treating any particular reading of it as final.
The Bereans, in Acts 17, are commended for receiving Paul’s teaching and then “examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). They didn’t treat any human teacher — including an apostle — as the final word on what Scripture said. They went back to the text. That posture is part of what it means to take the Bible seriously.
Holding both things at once
The faithful position is to hold two things at the same time.
Scripture stands over me. I don’t get to dismiss it, edit it, or rewrite it to suit my preferences. The text says what it says, and I have to engage what is actually there.
And: my reading of Scripture is always provisional. I might have gotten it wrong. My tradition might have gotten it wrong. The confident reading I inherited might have been carrying assumptions the text doesn’t actually require. I don’t know everything, I’m not above correction, and the work of understanding Scripture better is ongoing — not finished.
Faithfulness requires humility not only before the text, but also about my interpretation of the text.
Those two postures are not in tension. They reinforce each other. The reason to be humble about my interpretation is precisely because Scripture has more authority than my reading does. If my reading had the same authority as Scripture, humility about my reading would amount to humility about Scripture itself. But because Scripture stands over my reading, I can hold my interpretation with appropriate tentativeness without diminishing the authority of the text.
When Paul writes that “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” and “now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12), he’s naming something important. Our knowledge — including our knowledge of what Scripture means — is partial. It will be partial until the end. Holding our interpretations as if they were final treats this side of the resurrection as if it were the other side.
What this looks like in practice
A few things follow from this distinction.
When you encounter someone disagreeing with a Christian position, ask first whether the disagreement is with Scripture itself or with a particular reading of Scripture. Often it’s the second, and the conversation gets more honest once that’s clear.
When you encounter the phrase “the Bible clearly says,” ask what’s after the phrase. If what follows is something genuinely undisputed across centuries and traditions — that Jesus rose from the dead, that God is one, that the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost — the phrase is doing legitimate work. If what follows is contested among serious Christians and has been throughout church history, the phrase is doing something else. It’s collapsing interpretation into authority.
When you find yourself certain about a contested biblical question, hold the certainty alongside the recognition that confident certainty on contested questions is exactly what the church has had to revisit repeatedly. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It means the posture appropriate to your reading is humility, not absolute claim.
When the church revisits something — when a long-held confident reading turns out to have been doing damage — the response that takes Scripture most seriously is not to dig in. It’s to do the careful work of going back to the text, asking what was actually being said, and being willing to find that the inherited reading needed correcting.
This is not a slippery slope. It’s not a path to abandoning Scripture. It’s the way the church has stayed faithful to Scripture across two thousand years of changing circumstances — by holding the text as authoritative while holding its own readings as provisional, and by trusting that the Spirit who inspired the text also continues to teach the church how to read it.
The Bible stands over me. My reading of the Bible does not stand over me in the same way.
Holding those two things together isn’t a compromise. It’s what faithfulness actually looks like.
