Bible reading is good. Coming to understand what God says in his Word delights the soul (Ps. 119). But have you ever stopped and wondered, “How do we come to understand the meaning of a passage of Scripture?”
What may seem like a simple question at first is in fact a door into the study of causality. Aristotle taught that the causality of things could be parsed into four kinds of causes: the efficient cause, the formal cause, the material cause, and the final or teleological cause. This rubric has been used by theologians for millennia to help make key distinctions and bring clarity to discussions about causality.
As a Bible college student deep in the world of grammatical-historical forms of interpretation, I understood the causality of scriptural understanding as follows: The efficient cause (the first domino in the chain of causality) is mental effort. The formal cause (the way or structure of understanding) is freeing oneself from incorrect presuppositions to allow the reasonable meaning of the text to rise to the surface through grammatical-historical study. The material cause (what understanding is made of and works with) is the information contained in the text. The teleological cause (the goal of understanding) is to know what the text meant (especially for the original audience).
I’m sure that many Bible readers can sympathize with this understanding of understanding. Although there is truth in how I would have traced the causes of understanding, I now believe this answer proves to be a “thin” account of how God reveals himself in Bible reading. I’ve since learned that the Bible itself describes the event of scriptural understanding in a far deeper way, revealing that reading the Bible is far more glorious than I had originally thought.
To explore this, I want to consider Acts 8:26-40, the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. The text depicts a man coming to understand the Scriptures in a way that challenges our modern assumptions about biblical interpretation. In the story of the eunuch and Philip we can discern a more comprehensive account of the causality of scriptural understanding.
This account does not replace the causes of mental effort, grammatical-historical exegesis, information, or knowing, but it places these things within the larger structure, or “web” of causality, namely God’s sovereign plan of salvation.
1. God Causes Understanding
What gets understanding moving? What is the fuel, the efficient cause, of one’s understanding of the Bible? The first thing we read is that, whatever we need to understand Scripture, we need more than mental effort. Acts 8:27-28 depicts a pious and presumably well-educated eunuch. From a worldly perspective, he’s had an important role as the treasurer of the queen of the Ethiopians. From a religious perspective he has just gone to the temple to worship God and is now returning home while reading Isaiah 53. But as important, wise, and pious as he is, he does not understand what he is reading.
“Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asks. “How can I, unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:30-31). The eunuch shows us that we need more than reason, intelligence, and logic to understand the Bible. We need more than worldly wisdom or religious impulses to understand.
So what do we need?
He needs a guide, or rather, he needs someone to bring him a guide. The efficient cause of the Ethiopian eunuch’s understanding is not Philip, or the eunuch, but as verses 26-29 show us, it’s God. The eunuch needs God to bring him Philip. The first domino in the causal chain that leads to the eunuch understanding Scripture is God sovereignly sending Philip to the eunuch.
This meeting is divinely arranged. God the Spirit brought these men together in extraordinary circumstances so that the eunuch would understand Isaiah 53.
Therefore we can say God is the efficient cause of understanding. Ultimately, it is neither us nor other people, not our reason nor mental faculties, that lead us to understand Scripture. God allows us and grants us understanding through an act of divine grace. He is the Author of the geographical and spiritual circumstances that lead to understanding Scripture.
You may be skeptical that this applies to you. But the broader context of the book of Acts encourages us to see ourselves in this narrative.
Jesus is sending out his disciples to spread the gospel, to help people understand what God has done in Jesus. Jesus says in Acts 1:8,
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
The church’s mission “to the end of the earth” included Canada. God has empowered his church to witness to the ends of the earth that the ends of the earth may understand God and his Word.
By an act of his sovereign grace, he has empowered his church with his Spirit to grant us understanding. As an act of grace. As a gift.
Beyond geography, the broader witness of Scripture shows that even when the Bible is in front of us, understanding needs to be enabled by God spiritually. He needs to work in our hearts to allow understanding. The Spirit must blow (John 3:8) and shine light in our hearts (2 Cor. 4:4-6).
The Spirit desired to blow across that dusty desert road that day and empower Philip to help the eunuch (who by the Spirit’s providence was reading Isaiah 53), and the Spirit willed to illuminate the eunuch—and us—to read and understand Scripture.
Whether we look at Bible reading geographically or spiritually, all understanding is from God. From the hearing of the Word to the mental processes to understand the Word, God is “the mover of our movement.” He is the driving force, the one granting efficacy, to our understanding of his Word.
2. The Church Forms Understanding
The role of Philip is not, however, inconsequential. The second thing we learn about understanding Scripture is that God uses the church to form understanding. If understanding is like clay, God creates the clay and then forms it as he desires in the church. God grants understanding from his grace then shapes it by the Spirit-empowered church.
Although the eunuch is reading Scripture, he is unsure who the text is referring to. Who is the one who before his shearer is silent? Who died? He is confronted by two options. “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” (Acts 8:34, emphasis mine).
Thankfully, God gives us teachers like Philip. The eunuch is coming from the temple. Let’s imagine he may have run into people there who were influential in Jesus’s death. He may have asked them who Isaiah 53 refers to, and they would have provided an answer from human cunning, craftiness, and deceit (Eph. 4:14).
His understanding was in danger of being malformed. The eunuch would have been in a storm of confusion and craftiness until Philip came and steadied the storm by giving him the true meaning of the prophecy.
When it comes to understanding a text, we face a number of possible errors and temptations. One common error in our modern age is the temptation to think we discover God and his works best when we are detached from tradition, presuppositions, and external authority: Philip should not plague the eunuch with his own “biases” about what Isaiah 53 may or may not mean. The eunuch should use rational means to discover the meaning of the text for himself.
A related temptation is to cement ourselves in our presuppositions. The cultural beliefs and presuppositions that shape our lives are “sacred” and must remain undisturbed. Philip shouldn’t tell the eunuch what Isaiah 53 may mean in the eunuch’s context and culture. What gives Philip the right to make his presuppositions more authoritative than the eunuch’s?
Yet in the face of those who flee or marry their presuppositions, the story of Philip and the eunuch displays the importance of reading Scripture with the tradition, presuppositions, and (ministerial) authority of the church. He must be invited into the gospel tradition of the church that informs the meaning of Isaiah 53, reshaping whatever context or presupposition he approached the text with before.
Philip shows us we need the church. The eunuch needed Philip to bring him into the revelation of Jesus to understand who Isaiah 53 was speaking of. The presuppositions needed to understand the text were given through the apostles (Eph. 4:11). We ought to read Scripture in the community whom the Spirit has made and enlivened. The church is there to form our understanding and protect us against human cunning and craftiness.
3. Christ is What is Understood
The third important ingredient to our understanding is knowing what is meant to be understood. God wants us to understand something in Scripture. But what is it?
Philip shows us when “he opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:35).
The eunuch, his heart covered by a veil of deception, was driving his chariot towards destruction, towards life without God, towards further and further misunderstandings, until Jesus was revealed to him (2 Cor. 3:16).
The same is true for each of us. Until we see the glory of Jesus in Isaiah 53 (and the rest of Scripture) we will fall deeper into misunderstanding (2 Cor. 3:18).
The eunuch needed to understand that the sheep “led to the slaughter” was Jesus, the Lamb of God led to the cross (John 1:29). He “like a lamb before its shearer [was] silent” at his trial (Acts 8:32). Biblical information was not enough, until he understood the information was ultimately about Jesus.
The eunuch’s misunderstandings obscured the true meaning of the text because he could not see Scripture’s material content. But with God causing understanding through Philip, the representative member of his church, the eunuch understood what the text truly is, the good news about Jesus Christ.
4. Understanding’s Goal is Joyful Discipleship
However, the eunuch’s understanding of Jesus, caused by God, formed by the church, has still not reached its goal, its telos. Scriptural understanding is more than information, but as the good news is understood, it reaches its goal in transformation, change, and renewal.
The eunuch understands this when he sees water and says in verse 36, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?” Baptism is the intended first step into life-transforming discipleship to Jesus. We repent of our sins and set forth our union with Christ by sinking and raising from the water, as Jesus has from the dead.
Baptism was the eunuch’s understanding reaching its purpose.
But then quite mysteriously, “when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more” (Acts 8:39).
Yet Philip’s absence does not impede the blessings the eunuch has received, for he “went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:39).
That the Spirit gladdens believers in the good news of the gospel as they go on their way rejoicing in discipleship to Christ is evidence that they have truly understood.
This means that if we or the eunuch were to ask “What does Isaiah 53 mean to its original audiences?” without asking “What does Isaiah 53 mean for me?” we would miss out on the joyous goal God has for us in understanding his Word.
Conclusion
Acts 8:26-40 gives us a deeper view of the event of Bible reading.
An event that doesn’t begin when our eyes touch the page, but when God sees us and sends his Word and Spirit to us.
An event that shows the importance of the church in shaping our understanding rather than our autonomous reason.
An event that depicts Christ as the substance of God’s Word.
An event that shows us that the goal of reading is never mere mental assent but joyful transformation at the sight of Christ in his Word.
