God in a drastic way, signaling his refusal to abide in Christ. Protestants reject that notion, believing all sin is the same, and so they must interpret the passage differently—ironically, for those professing sola scriptura, by imposing on it extrabiblical distinctions.
What about 1 John 2:27? Do we need anyone other than God to teach us? Catholics see this verse as needing to be understood in the context of the Church, of which John was a prominent leader. The Church of Christ is the only teacher they need—they do not need to be taught by the wicked men referenced in the previous verses, which is what John was possibly alluding to in saying they do not need teachers.
Even 1 John, which is a short and relatively uncomplicated epistle, contains many passages where the correct interpretations are not obviously clear. Throughout all of Scripture there are myriad others.
Perhaps, as some Protestants say, Scripture interprets Scripture. Maybe those who incorrectly interpret passages like those we saw above are simply failing to apply the other passages that reveal their clear meaning.
Scripture does interpret Scripture—insofar as God’s revealed truth is coherent. However, using this idea as a rule for interpreting the Bible just pushes the question of interpretation back to those other verses. And it’s further complicated by the question of which verses to use to interpret the problematic one. With the New Testament alone containing thousands of verses, how do we know which ones to choose? The Bible doesn’t provide us with a cross-referenced index. And what if we interpret those other verses wrongly in the first place? Then we are left in the sad state of using a false interpretation to interpret another verse, which can only lead to further error.
One Protestant friend of mine belongs to a community called the Plymouth Brethren. The Brethren are dispensationalists, believing that tremendous miracles, tongues, and prophecies ceased at the end of the Apostolic Age, since the books of the New Testament had all been written by that point. They base this belief on Paul’s brief statement that “as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease” (1 Cor. 13:8). The majority of other Protestant denominations interpret these verses to say that these gifts will end when Christ returns in glory, not that they ended when the last apostle died. But the Brethren are adamant about their interpretation of this passage, and it is one of their primary differentiating characteristics. Who is right? We can’t ask Paul what he meant, and either interpretation could fit the text.
The founder of the Brethren, failing to see the existence of charismatic gifts, went with his gut feeling that they must have ceased and found a verse that seemed to support his instinct. And so one single verse, given a novel interpretation by someone 1,800 years after Christ, caused a further Protestant splintering and produced another new denomination.
Evangelical pastor and professor John Armstrong expressed his perplexity at the seemingly endless differences within Evangelical communities, all of which are reading the same Bible and earnestly seeking the guidance of the same Spirit:
The bigger problem was that even evangelical Protestants didn’t agree with one another . . . about many important doctrines: our view of the inspiration of Scripture; how we define faith, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper; church order; the doctrine of the future; the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the doctrine of the human will; and the nature of how God’s grace works in salvation. The more I studied these internal evangelical debates, the longer the list grew. Something was wrong . . . but I still couldn’t see exactly what it was. 43
The problem is with the way Protestants go about trying to know divine truth. God didn’t give us the Bible alone to be subjectively interpreted by every individual Christian based on his own education,
Kate Corcino, Linsey Hall, Katie Salidas, Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley, Rainy Kaye, Debbie Herbert, Aimee Easterling, Kyoko M., Caethes Faron, Susan Stec, Noree Cosper, Samantha LaFantasie, J.E. Taylor, L.G. Castillo, Lisa Swallow, Rachel McClellan, A.J. Colby, Catherine Stine, Angel Lawson, Lucy Leroux