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HAVE YOU EVER HEARD THE PHRASE, “THE BIBLE IS SUBJECT TO INTERPRETATION?” I’ve heard it more times than I can count, and honestly it makes me wonder what the people who say it think the Bible actually is. My own passion to learn to interpret the Bible carefully and properly led me to take both undergraduate and graduate courses in biblical interpretation. It was in those courses that I discovered that I had, over the course of time, subconsciously developed a set of interpretive filters (some helpful, and some not so helpful) that I would often use to read and interpret the Bible. A big part of seminary for people focused on biblical studies is honestly identifying, and then correcting approaches to biblical interpretation that can lead to mistaken, skewed, or even heretical interpretive conclusions. I have never met anyone who wanted to be wrong about their interpretive conclusions (I certainly don’t want to be wrong), but I have met lots of people who, for various reasons, were mistaken, and I have made mistakes myself.
Catholics and Biblical Interpretation
As Catholics, we certainly believe that the Bible must be interpreted correctly and carefully in order to be properly understood, but we do not believe that the biblical text is subject to the interpretation of any individual person, or that any person’s interpretation of the Bible is just as legitimate as any other person’s. In plain speech, some interpretations of the Bible are simply wrong. But in other cases there may be several legitimate interpretive options based on a variety of factors. That can help explain how two very committed and godly people who both set out to correctly interpret the Bible, and who use the best tools at their disposal, might come up with very different conclusions about the meaning of a text. This is where the important work of biblical interpretation can be both exciting and scary, and it is also why we have the sacred teaching office of the Church to guide us in the process.
Thankfully, no Catholic is alone in his or her desire to grow and excel in biblical interpretation. Catholics have been preserving, translating, disseminating, and interpreting the sacred Scriptures for over two millennia, and although there is obviously not complete uniformity in every conclusion about the meaning of certain texts, there is a well-worn and trustworthy path for us to follow. Perhaps the most helpful starting-place for any contemporary Catholic who wants to sort out the basic interpretive ground-rules is the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (also known as Dei Verbum, which is Latin for God’s Word), which was part of the Second Vatican Council and was published on November 18, 1965. I was excited to see that this document was actually included as introductory material in my New Catholic Answers Bible (NABRE) given to me in RCIA when I began by Catholic journey. If you have never read it, I encourage you to pause now and read it before you continue here. It’s one of the best and most concise guides to understanding what the Bible is, and how to read and interpret it that you can find anywhere.
In what follows here, I’ll provide my own summary of Chapter III of Dei Verbum and end the post with ten questions that every Catholic who wants to study and interpret the Bible the Catholic way should be asking. Please notice right off the bat that Dei Verbum does not tell us that we should read the Bible without interpretive lenses. Anyone who knows better knows that this is actually impossible, though it’s easy to find people who assert that when they read the Bible they just let it speak for iteself without any interpretive prejudices. But the teaching office of the Church, graced by God with the charism of teaching (see Eph. 4:11, 1 Tim. 6:20, 2 Tim. 1:14, etc), teaches us both what the Bible actually is (for the Bible itself never tells us that), and what the appropriate interpretive lenses must be in order to make solid conclusions about the original meaning of the sacred texts. In order to stand on solid interpretive ground, we will need to be reminded of our responsibilities when making conclusions. Here is my own summary of what has been laid out for us in Dei Verbum.
In 3:11, we are exhorted to keep in mind that the Holy Spirit is the one who has inspired the Scriptures. This means that all of the 73 texts in both the Old and New Testaments are counted equally as divinely inspired texts, and the Church embraces them all as sacred Scripture. There is no text in the Bible that is either more or less inspired by God’s Spirit than any other. We are also reminded that while it is the Holy Spirit who inspired what was written, He worked in partnership with the men who wrote down what is contained in each and every text. The human authors did not all write in a uniform style, or use the same literary genre, or write at the same time to the same group of people for the same reasons. Rather, they wrote in the manner and style in which they would typically write, and which fit the occasion and purpose for their writing (such as law, poetry, history, novellas and parables, gospels, prophecy, letters, etc.). Even so, God is the one who inspired their ideas and their words inside of these varying literary genres. In addition, we are reminded that what the Scriptures assert is what the Holy Spirit wants us to understand and believe. This will make it necessary to discover exactly what the Scriptures are asserting (and what they are not) since they are an integral and profitable part of our preparation for faithful and effective service to God (cf. 2 Tim. 3:15-17).
In 3:12, we are reminded of the important fact that the contemporary reader is not the Bible’s original audience, and the present-day context in which the reader lives is not the context that produced the biblical text. In fact, no later context, and no context outside of the one that actually produced the sacred text is the starting place arriving at the original meaning of the text. To insist on imposing a foreign context upon the text other than the one that produced it is to risk misinterpreting what the original author intended to communicate, and misunderstanding what the original audience would have heard.
A simple way of understanding this important aspect of interpretation is that a text can never mean less than what it meant to the original author or audience, and it can never not mean what it meant to them (otherwise how could they receive it as God’s word to them?). It can also not mean something wholly contrary to what it meant to the original author or audience. Yes, there are texts that can communicate more than the original author and audience may have understood (such as is the case with texts that deal with Messianic promises and fulfillment), but no text, and no idea communicated in a text, can ever mean anything less than what the original author thought it meant.
As Dei Verbum teaches us, it is the original author’s words, circumstances, context, and intended meaning that must be sought out and considered first in order to properly interpret what the Holy Spirit wanted them to communicate to their ancient and original audience. Biblical authors wrote what they wrote from inside of their own circumstances, culture, worldview, and cognitive framework. Like all authors, they assumed that their message would be understood by their original audience according to how that audience understood things. Therefore, the task of biblical interpreters is to first seek to understand what the text would have meant inside of the minds of the original author, and thus, how that text would have been understood by the original audience. “What does it mean to me?” is not the correct first question for faithful biblical interpreters, and neither is, “What did it mean to this interpreter who came much later, and who lived in a different context than the one that produced the text?”
In addition to all this, we are reminded that we must also interpret any given text in light of how an interpretation either does or does not fit into the larger matrix of the Bible as a whole. We must also remember that although the Church’s understanding of a text or a theological issue may progress and mature over time, what has been said about them within the Church’s living tradition must also be taken into account when considering various interpretive options. This is important to keep in mind, especially where there have been differences in the conclusions of various beloved and respected church fathers, scholars, and doctors within the teaching office of the Church.
Finally, in 3:13, we must always remember that God truly wants to communicate with us! God has sought us out and has spoken to us in terms that we can understand. Though there are things that our finite human minds may never fully comprehend, God is not trying to keep the truth from us. In that regard, he has communicated to us not only with human words, but ultimately, by taking upon himself human flesh in order to disclose himself to us. There is truth to be known, and God is the one who both wants us to know it, and makes it possible for us to understand it.
Ten Questions for Faithful Interpretation
With all this in mind, I have condensed the big ideas here into a short set of ten interpretive questions that Catholics should ask when studying the Bible.
- What does the text say?
- What did the words, ideas, and concepts in the text most likely mean to the original author in his original context and circumstances?
- What is the literary genre of the text?
- What was the occasion for writing this text in the first place?
- What would the original intended audience of this text think the author was communicating to them? Are there ways to discover this from what can be learned about their culture, worldview, and cognitive framework?
- What does the rest of the Bible say about the ideas that are being communicated in this text?
- If I am reading an Old Testament text, how did New Testament authors write about the ideas in this text? What is the same, what seems different? What may account for differences?
- How did the earliest disciples of the Apostles understand the theological concerns or ideas identified in this text? Did they write about it? What did they say? Does their perspective seem different from the original text or from the New Testament authors?
- How did later doctors of the Church interact with this text or the theological ideas in this text? Are their ideas in sync with everything written and taught by the Church up to this point? If not, what might account for this?
- If the Church’s sacred teaching office has not spoken dogmatically about this text or the theological issues within it, are there various interpretive options or perspectives that are still being worked out among the scholars and theologians? What are these perspectives, and what are the relative strengths and weaknesses of their conclusions (especially in light of the first nine questions above)?