I live in the Denver metro, which means I live in the shadow of the mountains.
At some point, you stop consciously noticing them, and they fade into the background of everyday life, looming beyond the highways and neighborhoods. But every now and then, something shifts.
Maybe the light hits them differently, or a storm rolls in, or the sheer majesty just hits you like you’re seeing them again for the first time. And last week, when my wife and I were driving home from church, I couldn’t help but find it fascinating how differently people experience the exact same mountains.
Some look at them and feel peace; others feel insignificance. Some feel wonder, others intimidation. To one person the mountains are beautiful; to another they are harsh and dangerous. A painter sees color and shape. A climber sees challenge. A geologist sees history.
None of those people are necessarily wrong. They’re seeing the same reality, just from different vantage points and through different lenses of experience, maturity, emotion, personality, and attention.
The mountains themselves remain immutable, and independent of the observer. But finite people only ever perceive them partially, and I’ve started wondering if Scripture works similarly.
Not int a relativistic sense, where every interpretation is equally true and the text can mean whatever we want it to mean. Clearly, some interpretations of Scripture are wrong – context, language, and authorial intent matter deeply, after all.
But I’m also not convinced the alternative is to flatten Scripture into a single exhaustive interpretation, as though one tradition, denomination, or theological system has fully captured the depths of divine revelation. Many Christians actually acknowledge this phenomenon to various degrees already, when they talk about rereading passages and “seeing something new” years later. The text obviously didn’t change; it contains the same words in the same order.
Maybe we changed.
Maybe spiritual maturity is not merely the accumulation of doctrinal data, but the gradual expansion of our ability to perceive what was already there.
And that brings me to my thesis for this article:
Scripture is not infinitely malleable, but neither is it reducible to a single flattened perspective. Because finite humans encounter an inexhaustible God through layered revelation, it is possible for multiple interpretations to apprehend genuine aspects of the same truth without collapsing into relativism.
This would explain why suffering changes the way someone reads the Psalms, or why failure changes the way someone understands mercy. The words remain the same, yet the reader becomes capable of seeing dimensions they previously lacked the depth to perceive.
And if Scripture is truly revelation from an infinite God, perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us.
Perhaps revelation was never meant to behave like a flat instruction manual exhausted by a single interpretive grid. Perhaps it is more like a vast landscape: objective, coherent, bounded, yet inexhaustibly deep depending on where you stand and how far you’ve learned to see.
Again, that doesn’t mean every interpretation is correct. But it may mean that multiple people can apprehend genuine aspects of the same truth without any one of them exhausting the whole.
Interpretive Authority
To be fair to Eastern Orthodox and Catholic critiques of Protestantism, I understand where much of the concern comes from. Protestantism can absolutely become chaotic. Spend any amount of time in Protestant churches, or online, and you’ll eventually encounter someone who claims the Holy Spirit revealed an interpretation of Scripture that somehow no Christian noticed for two thousand years. Others, unfortunately, treat the Bible less like sacred revelation and more like a Rorschach test for their existing political opinions, personal desires, or niche theological obsessions.
And, of course, there’s the infamous question Protestants hear constantly: “If Scripture is so clear, why are there thousands of denominations?”
Over 41,000, to be precise.
Underneath all of this lies the very real fear of fragmentation. If every individual becomes their own final interpretive authority, truth itself seems to dissolve into endless subjectivity. Christianity begins to resemble a theological free-for-all where certainty becomes impossible and contradiction multiplies indefinitely.
In that environment, the centralized authority of either Eastern Orthodoxy or Catholicism starts to feel comforting. Being able to appeal to one church, one tradition, one authoritative interpretive framework, and one continuous voice stretching backward through history is a very understandable attempt to solve the anxiety of interpretive instability.
And it’s true that modern evangelical culture can drift into an intensely individualist approach to Scripture where historical context, literary context, and church history are treated as optional. “My interpretation” often becomes synonymous with “what the text objectively means,” and that approach deserves intense criticism.
Even so, I’m not convinced that pendulum swinging the other direction is the proper approach either. Flattening Scripture into a singular authorized perspective, as though revelation functioned like a legal code, is something that the text itself resists.
The Bible is filled with patterns, echoes, symbols, typology, poetry, layered imagery, and theological depth that continually invite rereading and deeper reflection. The biblical authors themselves often revisit earlier passages and draw out dimensions that were not immediately obvious on the surface level of the text.
Matthew reads Hosea differently than Hosea’s original audience would have (Matt 2:15); Paul sees layers in Abraham that many readers would miss (Gal 3:16); the author of Hebrews reads the Old Testament almost like a vast network of interconnected shadows and fulfillments converging in Christ.
However, one of the most striking examples is in Acts 15:16-17, where James quotes Amos 9:11-12 to support the inclusion of Gentiles in the people of God. If you go back and read Amos in its original context, Amos is talking about the restoration of David’s fallen kingdom and the return of Israel from judgment. Yet James sees that prophecy reaching its fullest expression in Christ and the incorporation of Gentiles into the restored people of God.
It’s not as though the original meaning is wrong or discarded. Rather, James is noting a dimension of the prophecy that extends beyond what many readers would have expected from Amos alone.
We see something similar in Galatians 4:21-31, where Paul discusses Sarah and Hagar. In verse 24, Paul explicitly says: “Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants.”
He then connects Hagar with Sinai and the present Jerusalem, Sarah with the heavenly Jerusalem, and Isaac with the children of promise. Genesis itself isn’t about first-century debates concerning law and gospel, but Paul perceives a deeper theological pattern embedded within the narrative.
Needless to say, the biblical authors don’t ignore context; they just see more in the text than its immediate historical setting. Obviously it’s still good to ask, “What did the text mean to its original audience?” but the apostles seemed equally interested in asking, “How does this text fit into the larger story God has been telling all along?”
The biblical authors don’t approach earlier Scripture as though every passage has one and only one permissible dimension of meaning. They see historical meaning, typological meaning, covenantal meaning, christological meaning, and theological meaning operating together.
At this point, some may object that the examples above are unique to the apostles. After all, Matthew, Paul, James, and the other biblical authors were specially inspired by God, so perhaps they were qualified to perceive layers of meaning in Scripture that ordinary Christians have no business attempting to find.
There is certainly some truth to that observation. The apostles occupied a unique role in redemptive history that none of us can claim today.
Yet that response raises a more important question: If the apostles were uniquely authorized to interpret Scripture in layered ways, where does Scripture itself teach that revelation possesses only a single valid layer of meaning for everyone else?
Because the point of this article is to say that certain Scripture can have multiple valid interpretations; whether or not we can attain a valid interpretation is an entirely different matter.
The apostles don’t merely tell us what to believe: they model how to read. Again and again, they draw connections, patterns, types, and fulfillments that extend beyond the immediate historical context of a passage while remaining faithful to its original meaning. Their approach suggests that Scripture is deeper than a flat reading can account for.
Still, Christians need the wisdom of the Holy Spirit and the Church, the guidance of those who came before us, and the guardrails provided by sound doctrine. Of course interpretation should have boundaries. But do those boundaries exhaust the meaning of revelation itself?
The fact that experienced guides know the mountain better than we do does not mean they have seen every face of it. Likewise, the existence of authority within the Church does not require us to believe that Scripture has been fully explored, mapped, and exhausted. If anything, the apostles seem to point us in the opposite direction.
Scripture as Landscape
Whether they’d describe it this way or not, I believe most Christians understand Scripture as something like a spreadsheet. Every verse has one entry, every question has one answer, and every passage contains one meaning waiting to be extracted by the correct interpretive method. Once that meaning is identified, the work is essentially complete.
One of the pastors at my old church even said, “Scripture only has one interpretation.” You may have even heard the saying that goes: “Scripture has one interpretation but multiple applications.”
But reducing revelation to a collection of isolated data points often leaves us with a picture of Scripture that feels strangely unlike Scripture itself.
The Bible is not a systematic theology textbook. Such a resource can be useful for training individuals or groups on biblical topics, but it gives an incomplete (and dare I say flawed) view of how Scripture operates.
Instead, the Bible is an anthology of stories, poems, laws, wisdom literature, prophecies, letters, apocalyptic visions, genealogies, and songs written across millennia by many dozens of authors. More importantly, these writings constantly interact with one another. We see themes reappearing, patterns repeating, and earlier events becomes templates (or types) for later events. Characters, places, and institutions take on symbolic significance that extends far beyond their immediate historical context.
In other words, Scripture behaves less like a spreadsheet and more like a landscape.
When standing before a mountain range, you can focus on individual trees, cliffs, rivers, or peaks. Each observation may be accurate, but no single observation exhausts the landscape itself. The deeper your familiarity becomes, the more connections you begin to notice. What once appeared to be isolated features reveal themselves as part of a larger whole.
Scripture often works the same way.
A great example of this is the Exodus… At one level, it’s the historical account of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. But it’s also the story of God’s victory over the gods of Egypt, the formation of a covenant people, a pattern that later prophets use to describe Israel’s future restoration, and the backdrop for understanding Christ’s work, Christian baptism, and the ultimate redemption of creation itself. Consider the overlaps between the Exodus and Jesus’ baptism and temptation:
| Exodus | Jesus’ Baptism/Temptation |
|---|---|
| God went before Israel in a pillar of cloud (Exod 13:21) | The Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness (Luke 4:1) |
| Israel went down into the water of the Red Sea as deliverance from bondage | Jesus’ baptism points to water as a symbol of deliverance |
| Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness (Number 14:33-34) | Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness (Luke 4:2) |
| Israel dealt with hunger and the devil’s temptations | Jesus dealt with hunger and the devil’s temptations |
| Israel often rebelled | Jesus resists perfectly, embodying faithful Israel |
| God sent Moses to free Israel from Egypt | God sent Jesus to free humanity from sin and death |
So, you can easily read and interpret the Exodus for what it is at face value: God delivering his people. But you can also interpret it as a type of what’s to come: God’s continued deliverance of his people, with the ultimate example embodied in Jesus. Neither interpretation is incorrect, but they are both incomplete on their own.
And the Exodus is just one example. The same could be said of Eden, the Temple, Babylon, exile, sacrifice, priesthood, kingship, the Day of the Lord, and countless other themes woven throughout Scripture. The deeper we venture into the biblical landscape, the more interconnected everything becomes.
And this is precisely how biblical authors themselves seem to read.
I would argue that this phenomenon is unsurprising, because if Scripture truly reveals an infinite God, why would we expect it to function like a document whose depths can be fully exhausted by a single pass? Why would we assume that every passage contains only enough meaning to answer one question in one moment for one audience?
The fact that mature Christians continually discover new depths in familiar passages is often treated with suspicion, as though such discoveries threaten the stability of truth itself. But rather, perhaps those discoveries testify to the richness of revelation.
A text that can be fully exhausted by a single interpretive framework may tell us much about the framework, but very little about the infinite God it claims to reveal. Therefore, the goal of interpretation is to explore the terrain faithfully, recognizing both the objective reality before us and the limitations of our own perspective.
The mountain remains what it is whether we stand at its base, halfway up its slopes, or on its summit. The mountain doesn’t change. What changes is our perspective.
Multiple Layers vs Relativism
I want to, once again, emphasize that this is not some variation of relativism. If you don’t think about it too deeply, it can certainly come across that way; after all, if two people can read the same passage and come away with different insights, how do we prevent interpretation from becoming a free-for-all? What stops Scripture from meaning whatever each individual wants it to mean?
The answer to that is actually quite simple: The mountain still exists.
Throughout this article, I’ve argued that different people can perceive different aspects of the same reality. What I have not argued is that reality itself changes according to the observer. To restate my position, a person can look at a mountain and be:
- Awe-inspired
- Intimidated
- Speechless
- Excited
- Worried
- Emotional
- Jaded
Holding any one of those perspectives is entirely valid, but it doesn’t mean that the other perspectives aren’t equally valid. They’re all true because they’re rooted in something objective outside themselves.
Relativism begins when the mountain disappears.
When interpretation is detached from reality altogether, it becomes little more than personal preference, and the mountain can become anything we want it to be. In relativism, the mountain can become an ocean, or the atmosphere, or even an animal. Interpretations cease to be discoveries and instead become inventions.
Obviously, that’s not an appropriate framework to apply to Scripture. But it’s also not fair to say that, just because false interpretations exist, there must only be one true one. It just means there are boundaries we must abide by.
The mountains just happened to be what inspired me, but we actually see and accept this phenomenon everywhere else in life too. A great novel can be interpreted in dozens of ways without the text becoming meaningless; a human is psychological, biological, social, and spiritual without those perspectives competing with each other; and a marriage can reveal new depths after fifty years without either spouse concluding that they never truly knew the other. Of that their spouse has somehow turned into someone else entirely.
Depth is not the enemy of truth, but rather what makes truth worth pursuing. In my opinion, both relativism and interpretive authoritarianism underestimate the richness of reality. While relativism assumes there is no mountain to discover, interpretive authoritarianism often assumes the mountain has already been completely mapped. But ultimately, there are three truths that undermine these extremes:
- The mountain is real.
- The mountain constrains our interpretations.
- The mountain exceeds our interpretations.
And because it exceeds our interpretations, no single observer can claim to have exhausted everything there is to see.
The Inexhaustibility of God
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this discussion isn’t really about Scripture. It’s about God himself.
For much of this article, I have argued that revelation appears to possess layers of meaning that cannot always be reduced to a single flattened interpretation. Different readers may perceive different aspects of the same text without necessarily contradicting one another. The apostles themselves often read Scripture in ways that reveal patterns, themes, and dimensions extending beyond the immediate horizon of a passage.
But why would revelation function this way in the first place?
Again, the answer is actually quite simple: Because God is inexhaustible.
As Christians, we routinely affirm that God is infinite. Jesus even defines eternal life as knowing God (John 17:3), and an eternal pursuit only makes sense if its object is inexhaustible. On the surface, I think we all know this. We recognize that no human mind, no theological system, and no denomination can completely encompass who he is.
And yet, when we turn to Scripture, we sometimes behave as though revelation should be different. Suddenly, the expectation becomes that every passage must possess one precise meaning that can be fully extracted, cataloged, and systematized. Once the correct interpretation has been identified, the work is finished.
But why should we expect revelation from an infinite God to function that way? If God is truly inexhaustible, it seems reasonable that revelation would reflect something of that same depth. That doesn’t mean that every passage contains infinite meaning, or that doctrine becomes impossible. Scripture still communicates real truths, establishes real boundaries, and reveals real things about God’s character and purposes.
The point I’m trying to make is that revelation is deeper than our systems.
Back to the mountain analogy, a map can be accurate without containing every detail of the terrain; likewise, a theological framework can be true without exhausting the reality it describes. We see this with plenty of Christianity’s core truths:
- Christ is fully God and fully man.
- God is one and yet three.
- Divine sovereignty and human responsibility coexist.
- God is transcendent beyond creation and yet intimately present within it.
So, even if you’re convinced that Christ took care of our sins via penal substitutionary atonement, it’s okay for someone else to believe in Christus Victor. It’s possible that your view of atonement is correct, and it’s equally possible that their view is also correct; both can exist in harmony because neither fully encompass the reality of what Christ accomplished.
Too often, Christian’s lack unity because one side says, “The mountain is beautiful,” while another side says, “No, the mountain is fearsome.” Both sides are convinced that they’re correct, because in this example, they are. And yet, both sides are generally unwilling to humble themselves and acknowledge that their perspective is incomplete.
The mountain remains larger than the observer, not because the observer knows nothing about it, but because the observer can never know everything about it. Likewise, Scripture may continually yield new depths, not because truth changes, but because the God it reveals is greater than any single perspective can fully contain.
Final Thoughts
Perhaps the greatest danger in theological discussions is not being wrong, but assuming we’ve reached the end. All throughout church history, Christians have been repeatedly tempted by two opposite errors: 1) truth is unknowable, reducing interpretation to little more than personal preference, or 2) becoming convinced that they have the final, definitive understanding of Scripture, leaving little room for mystery, growth, or future discovery.
Both positions underestimate God.
Christianity has always affirmed that God can be truly known without being fully known. This allows us to approach Scripture with confidence, knowing that we don’t walk through a fog of competing opinions with no way to discern what’s true. At the same time, it allows us to approach Scripture with humility because no individual, denomination, tradition, or theological system can fully contain the God it seeks to describe.
That realization should make us more patient with each other. Certainly, some interpretations are wrong and must be challenged, like Nestorianism, Pelagianism, and Gnosticism, among a slew of others. Disagreements matter because truth matters, but before we dismiss every differing perspective as error, it may be worth asking whether another believer has noticed something in the landscape that we’ve overlooked.
After all, none of us sees the mountain from every angle.
And if Jesus is right that eternal life consists in knowing God, then the journey is not one that ends when we arrive at the correct theological system. It is a journey that continues forever, as finite creatures are drawn ever deeper into the inexhaustible riches of an infinite God.
