Interpretation of the Bible

“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”

— 2 Timothy 2:15 (ESV)

Interpretation of the Bible, or hermeneutics, is the discipline of determining what a biblical passage means as its human author intended it: its grammar, its literary form, and its place within the rest of Scripture. Confessional Reformed theology holds that Scripture supplies its own rule for this task. An obscure passage is clarified by a clearer one elsewhere in the Bible, not by an authority standing outside the text.¹ Hermeneutics is the science of the principles this task follows; exegesis is their actual application to a given passage.²

Confessional Witness

The confession’s statement of the rule is brief and is shared, almost to the word, across the wider Reformed family. The Second London Baptist Confession states:

“The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself; and therefore when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched by other places that speak more clearly.”¹

The Westminster Confession (1646), the Savoy Declaration (1658), and the Philadelphia Confession (1742) state the identical paragraph, numbered chapter 1, paragraph 9, in each.³ This is not a distinctively Baptist formulation; it is the wider confessional tradition’s shared teaching on how Scripture is to be read. That rule, that Scripture interprets Scripture, governs the account of interpretation’s history that follows.

Biblical Basis

Timothy is charged to be “a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15), a task requiring effort rather than one Scripture leaves to intuition. Peter grounds the possibility of right interpretation in Scripture’s own origin: “no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:20-21). Under the law, interpretation was already a recognized public task: when Ezra read the Law aloud, the Levites “read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (Neh. 8:8).

Christ supplies the pattern for reading the Old Testament in light of his own person and work: on the road to Emmaus, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Paul locates a further condition for understanding in the reader rather than the text: spiritual truths are “taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual,” while “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God… because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:13-14), a claim taken up in its own right at Illumination of the Holy Spirit. The Bereans model the ordinary practice this all implies: they “received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11).

Historical Development

Patristic period: two impulses

The church’s earliest interpreters divided along a line Bavinck traces to two identifiable circles. Irenaeus and Tertullian read Scripture in a way Bavinck calls “historical, positive, and realistic,” and were “sharply opposed to philosophy.” Tertullian put the divide sharply: “What fellowship is there between Athens and Jerusalem, the academy and the church, Christians and heretics?”⁴

Alexandria, home to a Catechetical School active from around AD 190, took the other path. Clement of Alexandria, and after him Origen, aimed to convert Christian doctrine into what Bavinck describes as “a speculative science,” distinguishing the plain faith adequate for ordinary believers from a higher gnosis reserved for the learned. The method this produced read Scripture for a spiritual sense standing behind the letter: “a pneumatic, allegorical exegesis served to harmonize it all with Scripture,” in Bavinck’s assessment, though the same method, in his judgment, “risked collapsing theology into philosophy.”⁴

The medieval fourfold sense

Medieval Catholic theology systematized allegorical reading into a fourfold scheme, later described and answered by the Reformed scholastic Petrus van Mastricht: alongside the literal sense (“which the letters themselves provide”), a text was read for an allegorical sense concerning “Christ and the church,” a tropological sense concerning morals, and an anagogical sense concerning “eternal life.”⁵ On this scheme, Scripture’s obscurity was taken to require “an infallible interpreter,” a role Rome reserved to the papacy.⁵

Reformed orthodoxy: one sense, many applications

Against the fourfold scheme, Mastricht states the Reformed-orthodox position plainly: “The orthodox allow only one sense, and that the literal, namely, that which the writer himself intends by his words.”⁵ A single passage’s wording could still be composite, figurative, or typological without multiplying into separate senses; Mastricht’s distinction is between a text’s one intended sense and its potentially manifold application, a distinction he uses to answer the objection that Paul’s own typological reading of the Old Testament (citing Gal. 4 and 1 Cor. 9:9, 10:11) proves Scripture itself supports more than one sense per passage.⁵ In place of an external interpreter, Reformed orthodoxy held to no “infallible norm different from Scripture as it explains itself,” governed instead by rules such as “the analogy of faith and of context, careful comparison of passages, and parallelism of sentences.”⁵

The same period’s confessional statements, cited above, and Charles Hodge’s later summary of the Reformation dispute with Rome, that Protestants held Scripture “sufficiently perspicuous to be understood” by ordinary readers “under the guidance of the Holy Spirit,” belong to the same controversy over whether Scripture needs an interpreter standing outside itself.⁶

Nineteenth-century systematization

By the time Archibald Alexander Hodge wrote his theological encyclopedia, hermeneutics had its own settled place among the branches of Exegetical Theology, distinct from the plain application of its rules to a text and from the history of how those rules had been applied before. Hodge defined it as “the scientific determination of the principles and rules of Biblical Interpretation,” covering the general logical, grammatical, and rhetorical principles of interpreting language, their modification for specific literary forms such as “history, poetry, prophecy, parable, symbol,” and their further modification for texts held to be inspired.²

Opposing Views

Rome’s fourfold sense is a claim about method: on this scheme, a single passage legitimately carries several simultaneous senses (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical) rather than one. Mastricht records Rome’s own supporting texts for this method, passages read with an allegorical sense (Gal. 4:24), an anagogical sense (Heb. 3-4), and a tropological sense (1 Cor. 9:9).⁵ Reformed orthodoxy answered that these are cases of a single literal sense receiving a manifold application, not evidence of several coexisting senses in the same words.⁵

Objections and Responses

If Scripture interprets Scripture, what infallible norm arbitrates when interpreters disagree? Mastricht gives two reasons for refusing any interpretive norm beyond Scripture itself: no text credits God with having “bestowed this sort of dignity and power over his word” on any human interpreter, and nothing besides Scripture carries infallible truth, a claim he traces by induction through the church fathers and councils, none of which Reformed orthodoxy grants that status.⁵ The alternative rules that remain, comparing Scripture with Scripture, attending to context, and comparing parallel passages, are fallible tools applied by fallible readers, but they do not require an infallible human tribunal to be legitimate.

Paul’s own use of the Old Testament looks allegorical and typological (Gal. 4:24; 1 Cor. 9:9; 10:11), so doesn’t apostolic practice itself support a manifold sense? Mastricht’s answer distinguishes a passage’s sense from its application: the literal sense of an Old Testament event remains one thing, while its application to New Testament readers, for teaching, correction, or training, can be manifold without that sense multiplying into separate allegorical, tropological, or anagogical readings standing alongside it.⁵

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 9. ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 1, “Christian Theology; Its Several Branches; and Their Relation to Other Departments of Human Knowledge,” 20-21. ↩ ↩²
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 1, para. 9; identically in The Savoy Declaration (1658) and The Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), same chapter and paragraph. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩²
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), chap. 2, “Holy Scripture,” 220-312. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. 5, “Roman Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Rule of Faith,” 106. ↩