Some readers will file the case against The Fellowship under a familiar heading. Critics believe one thing, the pastors preach another, both sides open the same Bible, and so the whole dispute gets dismissed as private interpretation of Scripture and nothing more. Part of that objection is true. Two Christians can read Romans and land in different places on baptism or church order without either one leaving the faith. So far the relativist has a point, and there is no use pretending otherwise.
The larger claim carried inside that objection is a different matter. It says that every disagreement about the Bible reduces to private interpretation of Scripture, so that no reading can be judged wrong, only different. That claim is not really about tolerance. It is an assertion about how the Bible works, and Peter addresses it directly in the passage below.
Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
2 Peter 1:20–21, KJV
The setting matters before the wording does. Peter wrote this letter to ordinary believers, and he wrote it to arm them against false teachers he knew were coming. That purpose shapes the sentence, and this article returns to it. The verse is contested, so the readings should be set out fairly before choosing one.
What private interpretation of Scripture means in 2 Peter 1:20
The phrase that carries the weight is “private interpretation,” and in Greek it is a single rare word paired with the adjective for “one’s own.” The noun is epilysis, meaning an unloosing, a solution, an explanation. It appears exactly once in the entire New Testament, right here, which is why commentators divide over it. You can verify the count on any standard interlinear. Because the word is a hapax, nobody can lean on a set of parallel uses to settle the sense.
Peter also flags the statement as a priority. The clause opens with “knowing this first,” and the “first” there is proton, a ranking word rather than a sequence marker. He is not numbering a list. He is naming the thing a reader must grasp before handling prophetic Scripture at all. Whatever the verse means, Peter treats it as foundational.
Two readings compete for the sentence. On the first, the target is the reader, and Peter forbids the believer from making Scripture mean whatever his private judgment prefers. On the second, the target is the prophet, and Peter says the message never came about because some prophet untied his own meaning out of his own head. The word did not originate in the man. That second reading is the one that first draws many readers to the passage, and it is also the one an informed opponent will contest.
Here is the concession that reading forces, made plainly. The stronger case sits with the origin reading, and the reason is the next verse. Peter opens verse 21 with “for,” which signals that he is about to explain the claim he just made. He then explains it entirely in terms of origin. The prophecy “came not in old time by the will of man,” but holy men “spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” That is a statement about where the message came from, not about who gets to explain it later.
The grammar points the same way. The verb translated “moved” in verse 21 is pheromenoi, a participle of the ordinary Greek verb for carrying or bearing along, and the same verb sits behind “came” earlier in the sentence. Peter writes, in effect, that prophecy was not borne along by the will of man, but that men were borne along by the Spirit. Luke uses that same word for a ship driven before the wind in Acts 27. The prophet is the vessel and the Spirit is the wind, which is a picture of source rather than of interpretation.
One detail cuts the other way, and honesty requires naming it. The verb in verse 20, ginetai, stands in the present tense, and some readers hear an ongoing state in it, as though Peter described how prophecy keeps functioning for later readers. That is a fair observation. Still, the explanatory “for” of verse 21 governs the thought, and that explanation speaks only of origin. Peter interprets his own meaning in the following clause, and it is origin.
So the point is granted. Read on the surface alone, verse 20 looks like a bare rule against readers thinking for themselves, and verse 21 would undercut that reading within a sentence. The passage concerns the divine origin of the prophetic word. That origin, though, is what answers the relativist rather than what rescues him.
Divine origin and the claim that it is all interpretation
The relativist position rests on a hidden premise. The premise is that the text carries no fixed meaning of its own, so that every reading is a reader projecting himself onto a blank surface. If that were true, “who is to say?” would end the conversation. But verse 21 denies exactly that premise. The word did not begin in a human mind. It began in God, and the Spirit carried it into human speech.
A message with a real author has a determinate meaning, whether or not the reader has recovered it yet. When an author hands you a book he wrote, you are not free to decide it means whatever pleases you, and sincerity cannot turn a misreading into a valid one. The book meant something before you touched it, and the author fixed that meaning when he wrote it. Peter locates the authorship of Scripture in God, so God fixes its meaning, and that meaning stands over every reader as the standard the reader is trying to reach.
This is why “who is to say?” has an answer, and the answer is the author. The task in front of an honest reader is not to originate meaning but to recover it, and recovery has rules. You read the words in their grammar, their historical setting, their literary context, and against the rest of what the same author has said. A reading that survives those tests has a claim the text can support. A reading that ignores them does not become equal to it because someone holds it firmly.
Does the Spirit not illumine the reader?
A sharper objection waits here. Scripture does teach that the Spirit helps believers grasp the word, and Paul says the natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit because he lacks the discernment to weigh them. Does that help not make interpretation subjective after all, a private matter between each reader and God? The objection quietly fuses two things that need separating.
Illumination and meaning are not the same act. Meaning is what the text says, fixed by its author, sitting in the words whether the reader receives it or resists it. Illumination is the help that lets a reader accept and apply what is already there. The Spirit opens the eyes of the reader; He does not rewrite the letter on the page. So illumination never yields a private meaning the grammar cannot bear, and it never contradicts what the same Spirit inspired elsewhere. A claimed insight that breaks the text, or breaks the rest of Scripture, is an invention.
The Fellowship works in the gap between those two ideas. It presents the pastor’s pronouncement as illumination, a Spirit-given reading the member is not equipped to question. When that pronouncement cannot be defended from the grammar and the context, the label has done no work. It has borrowed the authority of the Spirit to protect a claim the Spirit never made. That is private interpretation of Scripture in the sense Peter rules out, offered under the name of its opposite.
The same verse that binds the reader also binds the pastor
The passage cuts in a second direction. If no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation, then no single man unlocks the text by his own authority either. The prohibition does not exempt the ordained. It falls on anyone who claims a private key to what God said, because that is the posture the verse rules out.
The origin reading fences the path on both sides. It stops the individual from treating Scripture as a canvas for his preferences, and it stops the leader from treating Scripture as a canvas for his control. Both errors grow from the same root, a human being deciding that the meaning of the word runs through him. Peter closes that door once, and it stays closed against the layman and the bishop alike.
Former members of The Door, the Dutch branch of the Christian Fellowship Ministries network, know the machinery from the inside. The system rarely argues that its readings are correct on the merits, because merits invite testing. It relocates the authority instead. The pastor is styled as “the man of God,” and to question his handling of a text becomes an attack on the anointing rather than a disagreement about grammar. Wayman Mitchell, who founded The Fellowship, built its culture around a reproducible pattern of ministry and submission that flows downward from the pulpit. The Fellowship’s own discipleship literature documents that pattern in its own words.
Set that arrangement beside 2 Peter 1:20 and the two cannot stand together. A man who says the meaning of a passage is whatever he tells you it is, and that checking him is rebellion, is doing the one thing the verse forbids. He has made the word subject to his private unlocking. The Fellowship treats the verse, on the rare occasion it uses it, as a restraint on the members. In context it restrains the pulpit.
The apostles built a check, and it runs upward
The next objection is usually that someone has to interpret, so authority has to land somewhere, and the pastor is the obvious place. That is a fair worry, and the New Testament takes it seriously. It does not answer the worry by denying that teachers exist. It installs a check, and the direction of that check is the point.
When Paul preached at Berea, Luke records that the hearers did the thing The Fellowship treats as insubordination. They “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so,” and Luke calls them noble for it. The test ran upward. The congregation held the apostle’s teaching against the written word, and Paul is never shown resenting it. If an apostle carrying revelation welcomed the Berean standard, no pastor in Arizona or Zwolle sits above it. A teacher who claims to be beyond checking has stepped outside the standard the apostles set.
The same upward test appears wherever the apostles touch it. Paul tells the Thessalonians to prove all things and hold fast the good. John tells his readers to try the spirits rather than trust them, because many false prophets have gone out. Neither writer hands the congregation to a single figure and tells them to stop weighing. They assume the flock will weigh, and they command it.
The structure of church office says the same thing more quietly. The apostles appoint elders against a public list of qualifications, a list any member can read and apply. The office appears in the plural, so that no single figure becomes the sole channel of God to the people. The word is committed to the whole church, not to a caste that dispenses it. Peter, writing the very letter in front of us, calls ordinary believers a royal priesthood. A priesthood does not need a broker to reach the text, and a broker who insists otherwise is guarding his own position rather than the flock.
Peter wrote these lines against false teachers
None of this is a detour from Peter’s purpose, because his purpose is the danger described above. The chapter break tempts us to read verses 20 and 21 as an abstract note on inspiration, but the letter has a target, and Peter names it in the next breath. False teachers are coming, he warns, men who will rise inside the church rather than outside it.
He is precise about what they will do. They will “privily” bring in destructive teaching, working by stealth rather than open argument. They will, in one blunt phrase, “make merchandise of you,” turning the congregation into inventory to be sold. And they will “promise them liberty” while they themselves are servants of corruption, offering a freedom they cannot give to people they are quietly binding. Those marks describe a high-control church in first-century language.
The placement of the passage now makes sense. Peter grounds the reliability of the prophetic word and insists that its meaning came from God rather than from any man’s private unlocking. He then warns that men will come who trade on the word for gain. The order is deliberate. He hands the flock an objective standard first, so they can measure the exploiter against it later. Without a fixed meaning the congregation has no instrument to test the teacher against, and the position that says it is all interpretation, whatever its intent, removes that instrument.
What this leaves the reader holding
So return to the objection this article began with. When someone says the quarrel with The Fellowship is only a difference of interpretation, agree with the small true part and refuse the large false one. Some questions in Scripture stay open, and honest believers differ on them without sin. But whether a pastor may make a text mean whatever secures his authority is not one of those open questions, and calling it a difference of interpretation dignifies it. Peter has already closed the question. The meaning came from God, it stands over every reader and every preacher, and the ordinary labor of reading in context recovers it rather than an office conferring it.
That standard protects you in both directions. It denies you the right to bend Scripture to your comfort, which is a mercy, because a Bible you can bend cannot save you from anything. And it denies any man the right to bend Scripture to his advantage over you, because the same fixed meaning that judges your reading judges his. If you are trying to understand the system, that is the point on which the whole system turns. If you are trying to leave it, that is the ground you can stand on while you go.
