You are shown several “ink blots”–black images on white cards. You are asked to say something about what you see in the images or what thoughts are triggered by these splatters on a white background. Based on your response, assessments are made about your personality and emotional functioning. The tool is used to disclose a person’s undisclosed thoughts and feelings through how they respond to such ambiguous images.

You may have seen pictures of these ink blots–they are the foundation of the familiar Rorschach test. Mental health professionals are divided on the benefits of using such tests. Some insist that they might provide indications of underlying psychological disorders. Others–who question the diagnostic value of such tests–argue that because there is no right or wrong answer to what the ink blots picture, they can give the test subject an opening simply to share their impressions and begin a conversation.

In one sense, such ink blot tests are an invitation to respond viscerally to an image that has no intentionally designed content. One’s subjective response is of primary concern. Although some mental health professionals might find some use for such tests, the underlying design is something that should be avoided when it comes to reading Scripture–reading the Bible should not be like responding to a divinely designed Rorschach test.

All too often when people come to a passage of Scripture they react to it as one would to a Rorschach ink blot. “Well, what I see in this passage is . . . ” “I’m not sure what the writer wanted to say here, but I feel that . . .” “What this passage means to me is . . .”

Although we rightly want to come to find something personal, something meaningful, when we read the Bible, the starting point cannot be voicing one’s subjective response to what was read. For, after all, the inspired words are not ambiguous blots on a page but content-rich texts crafted with authorial (both the human and the divine author) intent.

When some religious leaders brought a challenging question to Jesus, He pointed them beyond their subjective handling of an Old Testament text, saying, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures” (Matthew 22:29). The implication? That there was a meaning inherent in the Scripture and that one’s subjective “sense” of what a text might mean is not sufficient grounds for an assertion. This idea is reflected in Peter’s insistence that some people “distort” the Scriptures to their own harm (2 Peter 3:16). What can that distortion be beyond attempting to make a text say something that the author of that text did not intend it to say?

To refer to misunderstanding or distorting the Scriptures tells us two things. First, that it is possible to misread passages. Two, that the Scriptures do have an intended meaning that can be understood.

It can be appropriate to respond to something that a particular passage stirs you, as reader, to consider. But to reflect on such implications should not be presumed to be what the passage actually means or what the author’s intent was in writing what he did. To privilege one’s subjective impression of a text will often result in either missing entirely what the passage is about or subtly highjacking the author’s words to make one’s one point.

Scripture is not a divinely designed Rorschach test that, in looking at a passage, one is free to subjectively conclude what the image “means to you.” To default to such an approach will, invariably, lead to misreading and distorting Scripture.