Many in the churches, particularly the evangelical churches, remain aloof to the reality of what might be called, ‘the hermeneutical dilemma.’ I have been writing on this over the last two decades, off and on, until my fingers have been bloodied (from striking the same keystrokes); and yet, still the same thing. People cannot imagine how it is that they are all products of teaching! They will sit there with a straight face and tell you that they don’t believe in theology, they just need and read the Bible. But then these same people will sit and listen to teachers who tell them this is all they need; that this is and was the intent of the Protestant notion of sola Scriptura. And yet the obvious, while it is beating them about the ears, roundabout, is absolutely lost on them! They cannot discern how it is that the teachers telling them that all they need or are being taught is Holy Scripture, is in fact a distinct thing from some sort of phantasmal naked Bible. In other words, these teachers teaching these people these things are themselves engaging in a hermeneutical or theological interpretation of Holy Scripture. There is no naked Scripture (nuda Scriptura), there is only Scripture as it has been given to and for us in the reality of God’s economy as that finds its res or reality in Jesus Christ. The second someone claims to simply be reading Scripture apart from doctrinal commitments, or what is better identified as theological teaching, this person has fallen prey to a self-refuting circle. The basic point is this: interpretive tradition, even if that comes to be that a person claims to have to biblical interpretive tradition, is in fact as inevitable as being a created being in the midst of a world that is sustained by the powerful Word of God (who is outside of us, in regard to His eternal and triune Life).  

I am not saying that the Bible cannot be studied for all its worth from within its own canonical strictures. But even that approach stems from a prior development wherein a person has self-consciously (or maybe unconsciously, as this post is trying to underscore) decided that this would be the best most internally consistent way to interpret Holy Scripture. The reality remains that even this approach, what we might call a second, second naivete, is rife with a logico-deductive decision to interpret from a place that isn’t itself Scripture. What I would hope people could come to grasp is that while they are denying that they have theology, or a hermeneutic (an interpretive system) informing the way they interpret Scripture, that these people would stop and pause long enough to recognize that in fact, by creational definition, they in fact do have these things operative as they approach Scripture. If you are a creature, and not the Creator, you and I, by definition, are defined by factors beyond our control. These factors form our preunderstandings about all of reality. When we remain unconscious of these factors, like the naïve idea that we simply interpret Scripture nakedly, we have the propensity to read foreign factors into Scripture, and then name them naked Scripture, unawares of how it is that these prior factors (or self-projections) are being read into Scripture. Admitting that we have these ‘factors’ at play, merely because we are finite contingent creatures, goes a long way towards developing good critical factors that help to prevent us from reading into (eisegeting) Scripture realities that are not there. I am only presenting a negative account of how interpretive tradition, factors, hermeneutics unawares destructively impacts the Bible reader’s engagement with Scripture.  

The point: when you sit there listening to your pastor, reading your favorite devotional, or picking up your Daily Bread, or listening to your most esteemed podcasters, and then say you don’t need anything but you and your Bible, you are refuting yourself for the whole critical world to see. It is best to admit that we all have interpretive tradition informing the way we interpret Holy Scripture, and then attempt to identify what in fact the factors are, in regard to the entailments of said interpretive tradition. Only then will the Bible reader be on better ground to engage with Scripture in a way that allows Scripture to be read out of itself (exegesis) towards and from its reality in Jesus Christ. Since most evangelicals, in particular, and other Christians, in general, fail to make this recognition, they will continue to naively approach Scripture under the delusion that they can do so under the powers of their own untarnished rationales.  

One superficial, but broad-sweeping consequence of this can be observed on theological YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other like platforms. Christians developing whole subcultures under the faulty guise that they simply read Scripture without prejudice, philosophy, or self-predication (in regard to assigned meanings). The real-life consequence of creating these sand-based subcultures is that people spend hour upon hour arguing about things that have no actual correspondence to the concrete reality of God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. In other words, failure to recognize the reality of interpretive tradition, factors, and hermeneutics leads people to build self-generated interpretive castles grounded upon self-projection and idolatry rather than the more sure Word of prophecy revealed in Jesus Christ.