Can unbelievers understand the Bible?
Question 1017
Whether an unbeliever can understand the Bible has direct implications for evangelism, for how we engage with non-Christian friends around Scripture, and for how we understand the Holy Spirit’s work. The answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no, and getting the nuance right matters both theologically and practically.
What an Unbeliever Can Understand
An unbeliever can certainly read the Bible and understand much of it in a straightforward informational sense. The historical narrative of the Exodus is comprehensible to anyone with reasonable literacy. The ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount can be grasped as a system of moral instruction. The arguments in Paul’s letters can be followed as philosophical reasoning. The poetry of the Psalms can move a person who has no saving faith.
This kind of understanding is genuine and should not be dismissed. Many people have come to faith precisely because they read Scripture out of intellectual curiosity, expecting a primitive tribal document and encountering instead something that addressed them with an authority and coherence they had not anticipated. God can and does use the plain meaning of the text to reach people who have not yet come to faith. The Word does not require a believer to carry it.
What Unbelievers Cannot Do
There is, however, a different kind of understanding that Paul distinguishes with 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 (ψυχικός), referring to the person who lives entirely at the level of ordinary human capacity, without the transforming work of the Spirit. What Paul identifies is not an inability to parse sentences about salvation but an inability to receive the truth as truth — to welcome it as the Word of the living God addressed with authority to them personally, and to respond with the submission and trust that constitute understanding in the fullest sense.
A person can know precisely what the Bible teaches about the cross and simultaneously regard that teaching as intellectually absurd: “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). That verdict is itself a failure of understanding at the deepest level. The information has been received; the meaning has not.
The Spirit’s Illuminating Work
This is why the Spirit’s illuminating work is not optional for genuine understanding of Scripture in its salvific purpose. When Jesus opened the disciples’ minds to understand the Scriptures on the Emmaus road (Luke 24:45), He was doing something the text alone could not do without His intervention. The Spirit who inspired the Scriptures is the same Spirit who illumines them for saving understanding. Without His work, the words are present but the meaning does not land with the weight it carries.
This does not mean that the Bible should be withheld from unbelievers or that we should not expect them to engage with it meaningfully. The Spirit works through the Word, not apart from it. When we give someone Scripture or explain a passage to a non-Christian friend, we are placing in their hands the very instrument through which the Spirit works. The point is not to be pessimistic about the encounter but to be prayerful about it, because the understanding that transforms a person into a believer is His gift to give, not ours to produce.
So, Now What?
When you share Scripture with someone who does not yet believe, share it with genuine expectation. You are not offering something that will inevitably make sense on purely rational grounds, but you are not offering something inaccessible either. The Word of God is “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and the Spirit who accompanies it is at work in ways that are often invisible to us. Pray before, during, and after such conversations. The understanding you cannot produce, He can — and He does, in His own time and by His own means, through the very words you place before them.
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12
