Soloist wrote:How does one interpret scriptures? group interpretation? bishop? "Spirit" led understanding? each person on their own?
Non-plain Mennonite attending a Presbyterian church.
All of the above, really. The group, the bishop, and individuals should all be interpreting Scripture regularly, together and as individuals, seeking a mature understanding. You don't get there just by listening to the "right" answers presented by someone else. As Hebrews says:
But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
Constantly practicing is important here. Constantly reading and applying Scripture to our lives, individually and together, and discerning together, by the Holy Spirit, in love, when we disagree. The maturity that comes from wrestling with the text together, before the Holy Spirit, is often even more important than coming to the same answer on every question.
I think this mirrors the kind of structure we see in 1 Corinthians 14:
When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up. If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silent in church and speak to himself and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged, and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets. For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.
There are several ditches to avoid. You don't want individuals going off in weird directions, the groundedness of the group discerning together is important. You don't want a Bishop to become a Pope so that the discerning community is nullified. You don't want tradition to reign supreme so that nobody can correct misunderstandings in earlier teaching. You don't want current fads to overwhelm traditional teaching. You don't want technical understandings to crowd out mature application. You don't want intuition and feeling to overrule a solid understanding of what the text can legitimately be understood to say. You don't want to insist on One True Interpretation when more than one interpretation of a text is clearly justified. Getting the right balance is hard, and it usually requires many different kinds of people working together, with different gifts and personalities.