When I quote bible verses, I am often told that I am not interpreting them correctly. Yet anyone with a high school education (something I have), should be able to easily understand what is written.
Why would you make that assumption?
The Bible was not written to 21st century English-speaking Westerners; it was written within the context of its own history, culture, and language. The Old Testament was chiefly written by a Semitic people in the Bronze Age in the Levant, their language was Hebrew. The New Testament was written chiefly by Jewish persons living in the Hellenized and Romanized world of the Roman Empire in Greek--specifically Koine, the common Greek of the ordinary man.
Interpreting Scripture means exegesis: extracting meaning from the text by seeking to understand what the authors themselves meant by seeking to understand how they thought, that means engaging with the specific issues surrounding the text as well as couching the text within the broader cultural context of the period.
That doesn't mean that you, someone with only a high school education, can't engage in the exegetical process; but it does mean that you can't do it properly without equipping yourself with the proper tools. You wouldn't attempt to read Homer, Shakespeare, or Chaucer without using the appropriate tools to properly grasp the author's meaning would you? So if you wouldn't do that with them, why would you do it with a collection of texts even more alien to the modern mind than these?
This is what I don't understand:
Either the bible is the Word of God, written by Him or someone inspired by Him, or it's not.
If it's the Word of God, then surely God is capable of writing what he means, and doesn't need someone else to interpret it. In fact, I would think interpretation is blasphemy, implying that God can't write at a high school level.
God didn't write the Bible. We consider the authors inspired, but they wrote in their language, they used their literary methods and tools for their intended target audience. The Bible wasn't written to you or to me, it was written to a diverse set of audiences depending on which text we are talking about. St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans was written to the Christian community in Rome, and addresses a conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christians in that community. That's necessary context in order to make any sense of the text.
If it is not the Word of God, then it is merely an anthology of stories written by men, and why would anyone think the supernatural claims in the bible are based on reality? Why would I consider these claims to hold more truth than all the other supernatural claims made by man, such as those regarding Mithra, Allah, the Dreamtime, etc.?
So, why does God's word need interpreting?
You are presenting a false dichotomy.
It's either a book written by God, or else it's just an interesting literary collection.
A majority Christian position is that these texts are, indeed, inspired by God, and thus received as Sacred Scripture, as word of God; not as a book written by God to us, but as a collection of texts gathered and collected by the Christian Church in which we see the divine witness speaking the Living Word of Jesus Himself to us. And thus we preach these words to one another for our own edification and the building up of our faith in Jesus.
The Bible does not exist independently of the times and cultures in which these texts were produced; neither does the Bible exist independently of the Church that receives, hears, believes, and confesses it as Sacred Word.
All reading is interpretation. There's no such thing as not interpreting a text. Just as all hearing is interpretation, the moment someone has said something and it is processed in your brain, it is filtered and interpreted.
The question therefore becomes not whether or not the Bible should be interpreted, but
HOW it should be interpreted. And that process has always been the work of a living community of people believing and confessing these texts as holy and inspired. Individuals working in community is how the Bible has always been read.
That's how the Bible came into existence in the first place, these were texts read out loud in the gathered community of worshiping Faithful. Christians coming together to literally hear the Scriptures read out loud, the Bible is the result of centuries of Christian consensus on what is, indeed, worthy to be read in the churches. What is, indeed and truly, what has been left to us as the faithful testimony of Jesus. Which is why the Church as a whole would come to reject some popular texts, like the Shepherd of Hermas, written around 140-155 AD, because it was so late. In other cases texts were questionable because there was no discernible apostolic authority (the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Didache), or because its apostolic authorship was regarded as suspect (e.g. 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John).
The history of the Biblical Canon is the history of a small collection of texts being circulated, some being disputed (Antilegomena) and some universally accepted from about as early as anyone even talks about the subject at all. But in all cases it is about what is to be read in the churches, read out loud as part of the Church's gathering for worship (liturgy), and thus the history of the Canon, the reading and receiving of Holy Scripture, is the history of Christians living and worshiping in community. You can't divorce the two.
When Martin Luther lamented that the common man could not hear the Scriptures in his own tongue it was not because he advocated an interpretation free-for-all; but because he believed that if the ordinary Christian (who couldn't understand Latin, Greek, or Hebrew) could hear the Scriptures in his own tongue then the ordinary Christian could--in the unity of faith within the Church--hear and truly confess the Word, and truly know the Word. Luther also advocated--thanks to the recent technological miracle of the moveable type printing press--the publication of Bibles in the common tongue to facilitate even more frequent hearing of the Scriptures (the literate could read, the illiterate could hear). But, again, not to produce an interpretation free-for-all apart from the Christian Community, the Church, but as more fully integrated participants in the processes of the Church. A fundamental tenet of the Reformation was a more full integration and participation of the Laity in the ecclesiastical structures of the Church, for example advocating congregational singing, the celebration of the Mass in the vernacular, the reception of the Lord's Supper in both kinds.
But it was also individuals in community.
-CryptoLutheran
