Should I Trust My Own Reading of Scripture?

Question 63.

Private interpretation is the phrase Peter uses to describe exactly the mistake he warns his readers against, treating a prophecy of Scripture as though it originated from the prophet’s own personal insight rather than from the Holy Spirit carrying that prophet along. The question of whether you should trust your own reading of Scripture, or defer entirely to trained scholars and theologians instead, sits right at the heart of what Peter is actually addressing, and the honest answer turns out to be neither extreme. You are neither free to interpret Scripture however you individually please, nor required to outsource your understanding entirely to an expert class standing permanently between you and the text.

I want to explain what Peter actually meant by this phrase, why neither pure individualism nor pure deference to scholars gets the balance right, and how you can read Scripture for yourself with genuine confidence while still benefiting from the accumulated wisdom of careful, trained interpreters.

What Peter Was Actually Addressing

2 Peter 1:20-21 states that 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. Read in context, Peter is talking primarily about the origin of prophetic Scripture, not primarily about how a later reader should approach the finished text. The prophets did not sit down and generate their message from personal speculation or private insight. God’s Spirit carried them along, so the message they delivered came genuinely from Him rather than from their own private interpretation of events, their own individual religious opinions, or the surrounding cultural pressures of their own particular day.

The Wider Principle This Establishes for Readers

Even though Peter’s immediate focus is the origin of prophecy rather than its later interpretation, the passage carries a genuine implication for how Scripture should be read as well. If the prophets did not generate their message from private impression, readers should not generate their meaning from private impression either. Scripture has a real, fixed, intended meaning, placed there deliberately by its divine author, and the reader’s task is to discover that actual meaning through careful, disciplined study, not to invent a private meaning drawn from personal feeling, cultural fashion, or whatever interpretation happens to feel most comfortable or relevant to the reader’s own circumstances.

Why Pure Individualism Slides Into Private Interpretation

Some readers take sola scriptura, Scripture alone as the final authority, to imply that every individual believer should approach the text in total isolation, disregarding two thousand years of careful, tested interpretation as though it counted for nothing next to their own private judgement. This is a genuine misreading of what sola scriptura has always actually meant, and it is worth being precise about the distinction since so much genuine confusion in this whole debate traces back to blurring it. Scripture alone means Scripture carries final, binding authority above every human interpreter and every human tradition. It has never meant that an individual reader’s private impression of a passage should be trusted over the accumulated, careful work of the whole believing community across history. Total private interpretation, cut off from any outside accountability, is precisely the danger Peter’s language warns against.

Why Pure Deference to Scholars Also Gets This Wrong

The opposite extreme carries its own real danger. Treating trained scholars as though only they could legitimately read Scripture, with ordinary believers required to receive doctrine secondhand rather than engaging the text themselves, contradicts Scripture’s own repeated commendation of ordinary believers doing exactly this. The Bereans were praised precisely for examining the Scriptures daily to test what even an apostle taught them, not for simply accepting Paul’s authority without question because he outranked them theologically. Scripture was written to be read, understood, and obeyed by ordinary believers, not reserved as a specialist’s document requiring professional mediation before an ordinary Christian could approach it directly, a pattern confirmed throughout the New Testament’s own letters, which were addressed to whole congregations rather than to a credentialed few.

The Actual Balance Scripture Commends

The genuine balance holds both truths together rather than collapsing into either extreme. Read Scripture for yourself, expecting the Holy Spirit to genuinely illuminate its meaning to you as you study carefully and prayerfully, since this is exactly what Scripture itself promises to ordinary believers. At the same time, hold your own conclusions with real humility, testing them against the careful work of trained interpreters, historic confessions, and the collective wisdom of the wider church rather than treating your own first impression as automatically correct simply because it feels compelling to you personally. The analogy of faith, the principle that Scripture should be read in harmony with itself, functions as one important check on private interpretation gone wrong, since a reading that puts you in isolated disagreement with the whole historic church on a clear matter should prompt real, honest self-examination rather than confident dismissal of everyone who disagrees with you.

It is worth adding that scholars and trained interpreters are themselves accountable to Scripture, not exempt from the same testing every other interpretation deserves. A scholar’s credentials do not make their reading automatically correct, and church history includes plenty of learned, credentialed teachers who nonetheless drifted into genuine error, sometimes precisely on the doctrines their own tradition considered most settled. Trusting scholarship rightly means taking careful, trained interpretation seriously as one valuable input among several, not treating a credential as though it settled every disputed question automatically regardless of the actual exegetical argument being made on the actual page in front of you.

A further practical point is worth adding for readers who feel intimidated by this whole discussion, wondering whether they are even qualified to read Scripture for themselves at all. You are. The Holy Spirit who inspired Scripture in the first place is the very same Spirit who indwells every believer today, and learning doctrine as a new believer does not require a seminary degree before genuine, Spirit-illuminated understanding becomes available to you. Approach the text with humility, read it carefully and in context, consult trusted teachers when you are genuinely unsure, and trust that God intends ordinary believers, not only a trained specialist class, to actually understand what He has written for them.

A Simple Test for Telling the Two Apart

A practical way to tell whether you are reading Scripture well or drifting toward the kind of private interpretation Peter warns against is to ask whether your conclusion could be defended from the actual words of the text to another careful reader, or whether it depends mainly on how the passage makes you feel personally. A reading grounded in the grammar, context, and historical setting of a passage can be examined, questioned, and defended on shared grounds even by someone who disagrees with your conclusion. A reading that ultimately rests on this is just what it means to me cannot really be examined at all, since there is no shared ground left for anyone else to engage with. Scripture invites the first kind of reading and warns against the second.

Another useful check is simply asking whether anyone else, across two thousand years of church history and across the wide range of the church alive today, has ever reached a similar conclusion through careful study of the same passage. This is not a claim that majority opinion automatically settles a question, since the historic church has certainly been wrong about specific matters before, sometimes for centuries at a stretch, and 1 Thessalonians 5:21 still commands every reader to test everything and hold fast only to what is genuinely good. It is simply a reasonable caution. A novel interpretation nobody in church history has ever reached deserves considerably more scrutiny before you trust it than a reading with a long, well-established interpretive pedigree behind it, precisely because private interpretation tends to produce exactly this kind of isolated, unprecedented reading. This does not mean every new insight is automatically wrong. Careful scholarship does occasionally recover a genuinely accurate reading the wider church had overlooked or forgotten. It simply means a novel reading should be held provisionally and tested rigorously rather than confidently proclaimed the moment it first occurs to you.

So, now what?

The next time you read a difficult passage, resist both temptations, settling too quickly on whatever interpretation first occurs to you privately, or assuming you are unqualified to reach any conclusion at all without a scholar’s approval. Read carefully, pray for genuine understanding, and test your conclusion against the wider testimony of careful, historic Christian interpretation. Private interpretation, in Peter’s sense, was never Scripture’s own origin, and it should never become the whole of your approach to reading it either. Read confidently, read humbly, and let both postures grow together the longer and more patiently you study.

Knowing this first of all, that 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 Peter 1:20-21, ESV