What I’ve observed is that there’s two reasons why people want to *interpret* the Bible.
One is to justify false doctrine, to claim and explain away how Scripture doesn’t say what it says. It says what the interpreter says it means.
The other is to justify sin. We see that effort very clearly in the homosexual movement, where they are bending over backwards to excuse their sin, that God CLEARLY calls sin.
Sure there are some passages in Scripture that are confusing or ambiguous, but the vast majority of it is not and is to be OBEYED, not “interpreted.”
“Scripture that are confusing or ambiguous, ...is to be OBEYED, not “interpreted.”
Well by that logic, the rules concerning slavery should be OBEYED. And rapists should be forced to marry their victims. And a hundred other Old Testament conflicts with morality and the modern world.
I understand and agree with the dangers you’re pointing out. I have a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible, and I do believe the Holy Spirit interprets it for us. But the fact that we grow in understanding of it means in some sense our own imperfect human understanding is involved, too, and that can be all that’s meant by interpretation. It just refers to making sense of something, which is what we do when we read. A born-again Christian and an atheist will read/interpret the Bible differently. So, in another words, reading and interpreting the Bible can mean essentially the same thing. The real difference is in the belief or unbelief of the person reading/interpreting it. The idea of just reading and not interpreting the Bible can be abused as well. Anti-Christian unbelievers do it when they argue things like, “The Old Testament condemns as an abomination, right next to homosexuality, eating shellfish.” Their rationale is that this is right there in plain English and doesn’t require any interpretation, which of course it does. But they deceive many, many people with such arguments about many Bible passages that they take out of context. Most especially they mislead those who know little about the Bible, encouraging them to read certain passages and assuring them to take them just how they sound to them. In atheistic, anti-Christian writing, there’s a lot of that.