This excerpt addresses why we shouldn't rely on our own interpretation of Holy Scripture:
"But is it reliable to be guided by one's common sense in interpreting Holy Scripture? Who has not encountered situations where the common sense of different people evaluate one and the same occurrence differently? In interpreting the Gospel, Tolstoy often refers to common sense. But you would need the naiveté and obstinacy of that uncommonly arrogant man to identify as psychologically abnormal all those who cannot and do not accept his interpretations, which are based on common sense. But I think - and it is perhaps indisputable - that in understanding and interpreting Holy Scripture, our sense, left to itself, can in no way be 'common.' After all, he who observes his own moral life and has the courage to tell himself the bitter truth will no doubt notice how at times our mind is weighted down by the pressure of the passions and how we sometimes timidly and sometimes daringly and brazenly give excuses for our weak will. We usually agree with each other more or less easily on issues that do not affect our lives or that do not concern the orientation of the will. That is why in the field of mathematics there are so many universally recognized and uncontested truths. In fact, why should we not recognize that the sum of the angles in a triangle is always 180 degrees, or that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, as affirmed by Pythagoras' theorem? Is there any reason not to accept these mathematical truths? Accepting them does not obligate me to do anything. The same can also be said about other such so-called scientific truths. 'Why should I contend here, why break spear over it? Isn't it all the same to me whether the learned specialists tell me, for example, that matter is built out of Mendeleyev's atoms or out of electrons and ions; whether the world is an undulating vibration of ether or whether the sun is not in fact passing through the constellation of Hercules, but, let us say, through Cancer, Scorpio, or Lyra? If learned men have found that it is so, let it be so. Nothing is changed by it. It is the affair of the specialists, their domestic affair.' But the brilliant [Gottfried] Leibniz said with wit and insight: 'If geometry took up arms against our passions and our vital interests in the same way that morality does, we would dispute it and transgress it despite all the proofs of Euclid and Archimedes, which would be slighted as fabrications and be considered to completely violate the principles of valid reasoning, while Joseph Scaliger, Hobbes, and others, who wrote against Euclid and Archimedes, would not have so few followers as they do now.' But Holy Scripture is directed precisely against human passions. Everything in it speaks about life and the One Who said of Himself: 'I am the Life' (cf. John 11.25, 14.6). This is why our minds, left to themselves can remain neither pure nor sound when interpreting the Word of life."
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"Just how odd interpretations of the Gospel text can sometimes be apparent in the following example. The well-known V. V. Rozanov once interpreted Matthew 16.18 thus: 'Saying Thou are Peter, and upon this rock (the desert) I will build My Church is as if foreseeing that the entire Church, or almost all of her, would be built with a desert, eremitic character.' But in another place, someone of like mind with Rozanov interprets the same verse in a different way: Why was the Church founded upon Peter? Because he was married, had children, and passionately loved his wife and children, not parting with them even during his evangelizing journeys. Thus, the Church is based on the principle of the family. ... Is it not clear that there will be as many meanings to Holy Scripture as there are people and the moods they have?" Holy Scripture and the Church by St. Hilarion (Troitsky), the New Hieromartyr
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