You Are Already Interpreting

There is a sentence that circulates in churches with real force: I do not interpret the Bible, I just read it. It is usually said with humility and it is always false. Not because the speaker is lying, but because interpretation is not a second step you may decline. It is what happens when a set of marks on a page becomes meaning in a mind. You cannot read without it, any more than you can see without your own eyes.

Test it. The moment you decide that 'you' in a verse means you personally rather than the Corinthians, you have interpreted. When you decide that the seven-headed beast is figurative and the empty tomb is not, you have interpreted, and you did it so fast you did not feel it. When you read an English Bible at all you are reading a product of thousands of interpretive decisions made by a committee whose names are in the front matter and whose reasoning is mostly invisible to you. The choice is never between interpreting and not interpreting. It is between interpreting carefully and interpreting without noticing.

This is not a modern liberal complaint about the Bible. It is the Bible's own picture of itself. Nehemiah 8:8 says of the returned exiles that the Levites 'read from the Book of the Law of God, explaining it and giving insight, so that the people could understand what was being read.' Reading and explaining are named as two operations. The people had the text read to them in their hearing and still needed it explained. Deuteronomy assumes parents will have to explain the meaning of the statutes when a son asks (Deuteronomy 6:20-25). Jesus opens the scriptures to two disciples on a road in Luke 24 and their problem was never a lack of access to the scrolls.

So the question in front of you is not whether you will interpret. You already do. The question is whether the interpreting you are doing is disciplined enough to be corrected, and whether you can explain to someone else why one reading is better supported than another. That, and nothing more mystical than that, is what hermeneutics is.

It helps to name what actually stands between you and a biblical text, because vague talk about cultural differences lets a reader nod without changing anything. There are four distances, and each one fails in its own way.

Language. The Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and you are almost certainly reading English. Translation is not decoding; it is a series of judgements where something is always lost. Hebrew hesed has no single English equivalent, which is why translations rotate through steadfast love, mercy, lovingkindness and loyalty. Greek sarx covers flesh, body, human nature and the whole realm of unaided humanity, and a translator must pick one per verse. Worse, translations quietly resolve ambiguities that the original leaves open. When the BSB renders 1 Samuel 24:3 as Saul going into the cave 'to relieve himself', it has correctly identified a Hebrew euphemism that the King James rendered literally as 'to cover his feet'. You are given the answer without being told a question was asked.

Time. The most recent book in the Bible is about nineteen centuries old and the oldest material is far older than that. Nothing in it was written to you, and every document assumes a situation you have to reconstruct. Paul writes to a church you cannot visit about a crisis he does not bother to summarise, because they already knew. Reading an epistle is like hearing one side of a telephone call.

Geography and culture. The text assumes a world of patronage, honour and shame, arranged marriage, household slavery, subsistence agriculture, ritual purity, and city gates where legal business was done. A parable about a mustard seed, a sower scattering by hand, or a man knocking at midnight for bread runs on knowledge you do not have unless you go and get it. This is the distance most easily closed by ordinary study, which is why it is worth closing first.

Worldview. This is the deep one and the hardest to see, because it is the water you swim in. You believe things about the individual, about progress, about rights, about the self, about how causes work, that nobody in scripture believed. When Paul addresses a household, he is addressing a social unit; a modern reader hears a collection of individuals. When a psalm says the LORD does a thing, the writer is not distinguishing primary from secondary causes the way you instinctively will. J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays picture this as a river to cross, with differences of language, culture, situation, time and covenant between the ancient text and the modern reader, and their point is right: you do not get to the far bank by pretending the river is not there.

Everything you have read, been taught, suffered and assumed arrives with you at the text. This baggage has a technical name, preunderstanding, from the German Vorverständnis, and it covers your theology, your church tradition, your politics, your family, your economic position, your national history and the things you cannot afford to be true.

Rudolf Bultmann put the question sharply in a 1957 essay titled 'Is Exegesis Without Presuppositions Possible?' His answer was two-sided and both sides matter. Exegesis without presuppositions is impossible, because you cannot ask a question of a text without already having some concept of the subject the text addresses; you cannot read about grace with no notion of grace. But exegesis that presupposes its results is illegitimate, and that is the discipline. The interpreter brings a preunderstanding and refuses to bring a conclusion.

This means the useful question is never whether you have a preunderstanding. You do. The useful question is whether you know what yours is, and whether you have put it where the text can argue with it. A reader who says they come to scripture with no framework is not framework-free; they are simply unable to name theirs, which makes it unfalsifiable and therefore permanent.

There is a practical exercise here you should do at least once. Write down, honestly, the five positions you would find most costly to lose: about money, sex, authority, nation, your own church. Then notice which passages you tend to read quickly. The correlation will not be flattering and it will be informative. This is not a trick to make you doubt what you believe. It is a way of finding out which of your beliefs are actually resting on the text and which are resting on your upbringing while wearing the text as a jacket.

Principles without demonstration teach nothing, so here is a case where the plain sense reliably misleads a modern reader. Matthew 6:22-23: 'The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!'

Read on its own by an English speaker in the twenty-first century, this sounds like a warning about what you look at. Guard your eyes. It gets preached that way constantly, and a great deal of well-meant teaching about screens and images has been hung on it. Now look at what surrounds it. Verses 19 to 21 are about storing up treasure on earth where moth and rust destroy. Verse 24 is the impossibility of serving God and money. Matthew has placed a saying about eyes in the middle of a block about possessions, and either he has arranged his material badly or the saying is about money.

The words settle it. The word behind 'good' is haplous, meaning single or simple, and its noun form haplotēs is what Paul uses for generosity in Romans 12:8 and 2 Corinthians 8:2 and 9:11. The word behind 'bad' is ponēros, evil. And the phrases are not a Greek invention but a standard Semitic idiom. Here the BSB does you a favour that many translations do not: its footnotes give the literal Greek, 'If your eye is sound' and 'if your eye is evil', and send you to Proverbs. Go where they point. Proverbs 22:9 says 'A generous man will be blessed, for he shares his bread with the poor', and the footnote on 'generous man' reads literally 'He whose eye is good'. Proverbs 28:22 describes a 'stingy man', footnoted as Hebrew 'A man whose eye is evil', and 23:6 warns against eating the bread of a stingy man, footnoted literally 'of him whose eye is evil'. Deuteronomy 15:9 warns Israel against looking on a poor brother begrudgingly, where the Hebrew says literally that your eye is evil toward him. And Matthew himself uses the idiom in 20:15, where the BSB's 'are you envious because I am generous?' is literally 'is your eye evil because I am good?'. A good eye is a generous one. A bad eye is a grasping one.

Notice what this does and does not tell you about translations. The BSB's English text still says 'good' and 'bad', which a modern reader hears as eyesight, and the whole case sits in the footnotes. A reader who skips the small print, or uses a translation that prints none here, gets the screens sermon. The help was on the page and it was easy to miss, which is the lesson of this whole track in miniature.

So Jesus is saying that generosity and stinginess are not surface behaviours but the organ by which you see everything; a grasping eye darkens the whole person. That reading is supported by the immediate context, the Greek, the Hebrew background and Matthew's own usage elsewhere. The popular reading is supported by the sound of an English word.

Be honest about the remaining dispute, because a good teacher does not oversell. A serious line of interpretation observes that in ancient physiology the eye was widely thought to emit light rather than receive it, and argues that the saying is therefore about an inner condition shining outward, with generosity as one application rather than the whole topic. That is a real argument and it does not rescue the screens reading. Both serious options locate the saying somewhere other than where the plain sense put it, which is the point.

Here is the objection, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance. If a sincere reader with a scroll in his hand cannot understand without a guide, has the Bible been handed to the trained, so that ordinary Christians read on licence from the seminaries? The Reformers fought a war over this. Getting the answer wrong in either direction does real damage.

Look at what Acts 8 actually does. The guide God sends is not a scholar and does not claim to be. Philip is one of the seven appointed in Acts 6 to administer food distribution, a deacon by later reckoning, and what he supplies is not a technique but a person and a message: 'Philip began with this very Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus' (8:35). Then Philip leaves. There is no ongoing office. The eunuch goes on his way rejoicing, with the scroll, and the text never suggests he now needs permission to read it. Help came, help was needed, help did not become a gate.

The Reformation doctrine on this is more careful than its slogans. Perspicuity, the claim that scripture is clear, was never the claim that every verse is equally easy. The Westminster Confession states it with the qualification built in: not all things in scripture are alike plain in themselves or clear to all, yet those things necessary to be known for salvation are so clearly propounded that the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain a sufficient understanding of them. Note the two limits. What is plain is what is necessary for salvation, not everything. And the ordinary means, which include preaching, teaching and study, are assumed rather than bypassed.

So the honest position holds two things at once. What you need in order to be saved is on the surface and a labourer who cannot read can get it from a text read aloud. What you need in order to teach responsibly is not on the surface, and the difference between those two statements is the reason this track exists. Training does not grant you the Bible. It makes you answerable for how you handle it in front of people who will believe you.

One more thing, and it is the whole ethic of the course. A guide's job is to make himself unnecessary. Philip explains and vanishes. If your teaching leaves a congregation more dependent on you, you have done the opposite of what happened on that road, whatever your exegesis was like.