Who is Reading the Bible, and Does it Matter?
Last time, we talked about what hermeneutics is and why it matters for ordinary Christians. This time, I want to take that conversation a step further and look at something that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough: the person doing the interpreting. Because here’s something worth sitting with for a moment, the tools you bring to the Bible matter, but so does the person holding those tools.
Starting With the Interpreter
When we think about who is reading and interpreting Scripture, it helps to start with a broad distinction: the believer and the unbeliever. These are broad categories, I know, but I think they’re useful ones. A believer is typically coming to the Bible to deepen their understanding of God and strengthen what they already believe. An unbeliever might be coming to it with skepticism, or they might genuinely be searching for answers. The motivation behind the reading shapes the reading itself, which is why this distinction matters.
Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard identify five qualifications they believe every interpreter of Scripture should have:
A reasoned faith in the God who reveals
Willingness to obey its message
Willingness to employ appropriate methods
Illumination of the Holy Spirit
Membership in the Church 1
Let me walk through these, because I think some are more foundational than others.
The First Three: Non-Negotiables
The first qualification, a reasoned faith in the God who reveals, gets at something essential. The Bible is God’s Word to humanity, and as Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard put it, “if the Bible is God’s revelation to his people, then the essential qualification for a full understanding of the Bible is to know God and to believe that he is speaking through it.”2 Without that foundation, interpretation doesn’t just fall short; it can go sideways in ways that mislead others.
The second qualification, a willingness to obey the message, is equally important. If someone has no intention of actually living by what the Bible teaches, you have to wonder what they’re really after. Interpretation, when disconnected from obedience, tends to become interpretation shaped by self-interest.
The third qualification involves using appropriate methods. This is what we were talking about last week: understanding the background of the text, the culture it came from, and the language it was written in. Without the right tools and methods, even a sincere reader can miss what the text is actually saying.
I believe these three are the most important qualifications, and they apply whether a person is a believer or not.
The Last Two: Important, But Conditional
The fourth and fifth qualifications, the illumination of the Holy Spirit and membership in the Church, are genuinely important, but I think they function differently depending on where someone is in their faith journey.
For the believer, the Holy Spirit plays a real role in opening up Scripture. The Bible speaks of a work God’s Spirit performs in people once they have committed their lives in faith to Jesus as Lord. As Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard describe it, “this internal capacity enables believers to perceive and apprehend spiritual truth, an ability unavailable to unbelievers.”3 That’s a significant statement. But it raises a question I’ve sat with for a while: if that capacity is unavailable to unbelievers, how does anyone come to faith in the first place?
My own view is that because we are made in the image of God, we retain some capacity to understand spiritual truth even before we come to saving faith. The Holy Spirit works powerfully once we’ve placed our trust in Christ, but that doesn’t mean He’s entirely absent from the searching that comes before. For the believer, His illuminating work deepens and confirms what the text is saying. For the sincere seeker, I believe He can still be at work drawing them toward truth.
Membership in the Church matters for the believer as well. Interpreting Scripture within a community of other believers provides accountability and correction. None of us is immune to reading our own assumptions into the text, and being part of a local congregation helps guard against that. For the unbeliever who is genuinely searching, this may not yet be possible, but it’s something that becomes increasingly important once faith takes root.
What Are You Bringing to the Text?
I think the honest question every reader of Scripture has to ask is: What am I actually trying to get out of this?
Duvall and Hays put it plainly: “We want to dig into the real meat. But often we are able only to come up with baby food — soft mush for infants. This is not a reflection on the Word of God, which is loaded with meat, but rather a reflection on us and our inability to extract the meat and enjoy it.”4
That image has stayed with me. The Bible has more to offer than most of us ever get to, not because it’s withholding anything, but because of what we bring, or don’t bring, to the reading. The seeker looking for basic nourishment will find it. The believer who comes prepared, willing, and equipped will find something far richer.
This is a lot of what Not Forsaken Ministries is built around. You don’t have to be a theologian to read your Bible well, but you do have to come to it honestly: with the right posture, the right tools, and a genuine willingness to let it say what it actually says. That’s what we’re here to help with.
Sources
William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert L. Hubbard Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation: 3rd Edition (Zondervan Academic, 2017), 202.
Ibid.
Ibid., 206
J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays, Grasping God’s Word, Fourth Edition (Zondervan Academic, 2020), 51.