re more on peter in article may geneva rutgers edu jek cu nih gov writes in one sense no statement by another is subject to my private interpretation if reliable historians tell me that the athenians lost the pelopennesian war i cannot simply interpret this away because i wanted the athenians to win facts are facts and do not go away because i want them to be otherwise in another sense every statement is subject to private interpretation in that i have to depend on my brains and expereience to decide what it means and whether it is sufficiently well attested to merit my assent even if the statement occurs in an inspired writing i still have to decide using my own best judgement whether it is in fact inspired this is not arrogance it is just an inescapable fact yes there are these two senses of interpretation and certainly our decision to accept scripture as inspired ultimately rests on our own private opinion however when reading scripture we have to remember that the scriptures were given by god for our instruction and that the interpretation that matters is the one god intended for example if i decide that the fact that john the baptist is elijah teaches the doctrine of reincarnation i am wrong because that is not the intended interpretation the prophets didn t make up this teaching it came from god and we must accept it as such this necessarily means that our private interpretations must take a back seat to the meaning god intended to convey certainly we must rely on our best efforts to determine what this meaning is but this very fact should make us recognize that our private interpretations cannot be automatically accepted as the infallible interpretation of god we need to test the spirits to see if they are from god when the holy spirit speaks he says the same thing to all he won t tell me that a passage means one thing and tell you it means another if the two of us come to conflicting conclusions we can t both be completely right we know our interpretations are reliable only when the church as a whole agrees on what scripture means this is how we know the doctrines of the trinity the dual nature of christ etc infallibly these matters are not up for private interpretation this is the reason peter goes on to talk about the deceptiveness of the false teachers they preferred their own private interpretation to the god given teaching of the apostles it is through such private interpretation that the traditions of men so soundly denounced in scripture are started tony
