One of the legacies of the Reformation is sometimes called “The Right of Private Interpretation of the Bible”.
Before the Reformation, individual Christians were discouraged or even forbidden from reading and interpreting the Bible for themselves. Instead, they were told, the church tells you what the Bible means, what you ought to believe. This, of course, is what lay behind many of the other doctrinal problems in the medieval Catholic church.
But the Reformers objected to this. All Christians, they said, have the right and the responsibility to read the Bible and to seek to understand their faith for themselves.
Unfortunately, in our day, we sometimes end up misunderstanding the idea of Private Interpretation. We tend to think of it in an individualistic way: Every person has the right to decide for themselves what the Bible means to them; we don’t have to listen to anyone else. We end up as religious anarchists: we don’t need anyone to teach us; we just make up their own mind and follow our own path.
This is emphatically not what the Reformers had in mind. More importantly, it’s a serious distortion of the biblical picture. We need to place the idea of Private Interpretation within its proper ecclesiological context. The reason why we all need to grow in our understanding of our faith is not so we can all plough our own personal religious furrow, but so that we can all help each other.
To put it most bluntly, the person sitting next to you at church this coming Lord’s Day needs you to read your Bible between now and then, so you can help them, correct them, challenge them, teach them, encourage them. We all need each other to comprehend the faith more deeply, so that we all come to know more fully the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
Guest Post by Rev Dr Steve Jeffery, Minister at Emmanuel Evangelical Church, London, England (Blog, Facebook, Twitter)<>
