Can Unbelievers Understand the Bible?

Question 1017.

Spiritual understanding of the Bible is not the same thing as being able to read it, and the difference has real implications for how we do evangelism, how we engage non-Christian friends around Scripture, and how we understand the Holy Spirit’s own work in a person’s life. Whether an unbeliever can understand the Bible turns out to be a more nuanced question than a flat yes or no, and getting the nuance right matters both theologically and practically.

Let me walk through what an unbeliever genuinely can grasp, what they cannot, and why the distinction is not a technicality but something close to the heart of the gospel itself.

What an Unbeliever Can Genuinely Grasp

An unbeliever can certainly read the Bible and understand a great deal of it in a straightforward, informational sense. The historical narrative of the Exodus is comprehensible to anyone with reasonable literacy, a point I touch on further in a related piece on textual criticism and how confidently we can trust the wording we are reading. The ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount can be grasped as a coherent system of moral instruction, whether or not the reader accepts its authority. The arguments running through Paul’s letters can be followed as a piece of ancient reasoning, premise leading to conclusion, in the same way any other ancient philosophical or rhetorical text can be followed. The poetry of the Psalms can move a person who has no saving faith at all, sometimes very deeply.

This kind of comprehension is genuine and should never be dismissed or minimised. Many people have come to faith precisely because they picked up a Bible out of intellectual curiosity, expecting a primitive tribal document, and encountered instead something that addressed them with an authority and coherence they had not anticipated. God can and does use the plain, informational sense of the text to reach people who have not yet come to faith. The Word does not require a believer standing beside the reader to carry its basic meaning across.

What Paul Says Unbelievers Cannot Do

There is, however, a different kind of understanding that Paul distinguishes with real care. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned,” 1 Corinthians 2:14. The Greek word translated “natural” here is psychikos, referring to a person who lives entirely at the level of ordinary human capacity, without the transforming, illuminating work of the Spirit at work within them.

What Paul identifies is not an inability to parse sentences about salvation, follow an argument, or memorise a doctrinal formula. It is an inability to receive the truth as truth, to welcome it as the living word of God addressed personally and authoritatively to them, rather than a text to be analysed, admired, or dismissed from a safe intellectual distance. Spiritual understanding, in this fuller sense, is not primarily about intellectual difficulty. It is about the heart’s posture toward what the text claims about God and about the reader.

Why This Distinction Matters

The distinction matters because it corrects two opposite errors that show up constantly in how Christians think about evangelism. The first error assumes an unbeliever cannot understand anything of the Bible until they are already regenerate, which leads to a kind of despair about ordinary Bible reading, teaching or apologetics, as though there were no point explaining anything to someone who has not yet believed. This gets the text wrong. Unbelievers plainly do understand large portions of Scripture in the informational sense described above, and dismissing that capacity discourages exactly the kind of patient explanation that has, historically, been used to bring many people to faith.

The second error assumes that informational comprehension is the whole of the matter, that once someone has grasped the logical structure of the gospel argument, spiritual understanding will simply follow as a natural next step, given enough clarity or persuasive skill on the evangelist’s part. This also gets the text wrong, and rather more dangerously, because it reduces conversion to successful argumentation and risks producing converts who have accepted an idea rather than encountered the living God. Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 2:14 is precisely that spiritual understanding cannot be reasoned into existence by human cleverness alone, however sound the argument.

The Spirit’s Work in Producing Spiritual Understanding

What changes the situation is not additional information but the Spirit’s own illuminating and regenerating work. Jesus tells Nicodemus, a religious scholar who plainly understood the informational content of the Hebrew Scriptures better than almost anyone of his generation, that he must be “born again,” born “of the Spirit,” before he can even see the kingdom of God, John 3:3-8. Nicodemus’s scholarly competence was real and considerable. It was not, on its own, sufficient for the spiritual understanding Jesus was describing.

This is why, in my own framework, faith precedes regeneration in the logical order rather than the reverse, it is the person who believes who is then regenerated, not the regenerate person who is then enabled to believe from a standing start of complete inability. The Spirit’s convicting work, described in John 16:8-11, operates on the unbeliever prior to and leading toward faith, opening a genuine hearing that the natural, unaided mind resists. Spiritual understanding in the full sense arrives together with, rather than strictly before, the moment faith is exercised.

What Illumination Is Not

It is worth being precise about what the Spirit’s illuminating work does and does not involve, since some popular teaching muddles this badly. Illumination is not new revelation supplementing or correcting the biblical text. It is the Spirit opening the mind and heart of a person, believer or one being drawn toward faith, to receive what the text already plainly says. Any claim to a spiritual insight that produces an interpretation contradicting the plain, grammatical-historical sense of a passage should be regarded with serious suspicion, whatever spiritual language surrounds the claim. The Spirit does not whisper private meanings that override what Scripture, read carefully and honestly, actually says.

Practical Implications for Evangelism

This distinction changes how I think about conversations with unbelieving friends. I do not withhold Scripture from someone because they lack saving faith, as though reading it were pointless until conversion. I want them reading it, wrestling with it, asking questions about it, precisely because God has repeatedly used exactly that informational engagement as the means through which the Spirit later grants spiritual understanding and faith. Nor do I assume that winning every argument, answering every objection with technical precision, will itself produce belief. I have watched intellectually satisfied unbelievers walk away from airtight arguments entirely unmoved, because the deeper resistance Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 2:14 was never primarily an intellectual one.

Prayer, therefore, is not a formality tacked onto evangelistic conversation. It is the acknowledgement that spiritual understanding is finally the Spirit’s gift, not the product of the evangelist’s argumentative skill, however carefully honed. I present the gospel as clearly and honestly as I can, using the ordinary means of explanation, argument and Scripture itself, and I ask God, urgently and specifically, to do the part only he can do.

Spiritual Understanding and General Revelation

It is worth relating this to the wider question of what unbelievers can perceive of God through general revelation, since the two questions sit close together without being identical. Romans 1:20 states that God’s invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived in the created order, so that people are without excuse. That is real perception, available to every unbeliever regardless of spiritual understanding in the fuller Pauline sense, and it renders humanity accountable before God even where saving faith has not been exercised.

But general revelation, as I have written elsewhere, reveals enough to condemn without revealing enough to save. It supplies the accountability before which special revelation, culminating in Jesus and the completed Scripture, speaks with saving clarity, a clarity that still requires the Spirit’s illuminating work before it produces genuine spiritual understanding rather than mere informational awareness. An unbeliever standing under a clear night sky can perceive something real and true about God’s power. That same person reading Paul’s letter to the Romans can perceive, informationally, the entire structure of the gospel argument. Neither experience, on its own, constitutes the spiritual understanding Jesus described to Nicodemus as being born from above.

So, now what?

If you are talking with someone who does not yet believe, do not be discouraged when clear explanation alone fails to produce conviction, and do not conclude the conversation was wasted. Keep explaining, keep pointing to Scripture honestly, and keep praying that the Spirit will grant the spiritual understanding no argument, however skilful, can manufacture on its own. And if you are the one struggling to move from intellectual agreement to genuine conviction, ask God directly for exactly that gift. He delights to give it to those who ask, and he has never yet run short of it.

“The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” 1 Corinthians 2:14, ESV