How Do You Read the Bible?

No, seriously. How do you?

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

How do you read your Bible?

I’m not asking how you should read it. I’m asking how you read it.

A lot of Christians will say to this that they read it and do what it says. Which parts? Well, all of it! Being a Christian means you read the whole Bible and you take it all seriously. There’s some fudging on what to do with the Old Testament and what that means for Christianity, but on the whole, Christians agree that scripture is good and we ought to listen to it.

So here’s the thing. My audience for this piece is other Christians who think of themselves as Bible readers and believers. Everyone else can either follow along or sit this one out, depending on your interest. What I’d like to press us on is something that was invisible to me for most of my life until I went to grad school (at an evangelical college, no less). Here’s the thing: you’re not actually reading your whole Bible and weighing it all equally. You’re not even doing that with the New Testament. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. I’m saying this is what is happening, and we need to notice it and talk about how this happens.

Everyone, literally everyone, has a hermeneutic - or a way of interpreting texts to decide meaning and apply it. We can also say that this is an interpretive strategy - what precommitments you’ve made to help you understand a text as complicated as the Bible. We all have one. All of us. And it’s good for us to notice it.

In this piece I’m not going to tell you how you should read the Bible as part of your religious practice, or if indeed you must read it at all. At a later date I might write out how I do it, but that’s not for right now. What I want you to notice first is that you do have a reading strategy. I want you to notice the water you’re swimming in as a fish. So let’s do a little exercise and see if you can spot yours.

Part 1: Who Is Saved in the New Testament, and How?

Let’s look at some passages from the New Testament that talk about soteriology, or the theology of salvation. Usually, “salvation” among modern American Christians means “who goes to heaven and how” (but put a pin in that). Who does “get saved,” and how? How do we know?

All of the passages below are from the New Testament, so no dodging and saying you’re a New Testament Christian and the Old is not authoritative for you. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to use the NIV in all cases.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 5:17-20)

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. (Matt 19:24/Mark 10:25/Luke 18:25)

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me…Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink… whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. (Matt 25:31-45

Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household. (Acts 16:31)

Consequently, just as one trespass (Adam’s sin) resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act (Jesus’s death and resurrection) resulted in justification and life for all people. (Rom 5:18)

Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Cor 6:9-10)

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast (Eph 2:8-9).

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?…In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. (James 2:14-17)

So above we have seven quotes from the New Testament about who is saved. The first three are from Jesus. In the first, salvation comes from adherence to Torah, which exceeds even the scrupulosity of the Pharisees and teachers. Then we have the detail the rich cannot enter “the kingdom of heaven,” because, the context suggests, they can’t keep the law. Then we have a criterion of “inheriting the kingdom” and entering “eternal life” that depends on whether or not one cares for the least of Jesus’s “brothers and sisters.”

Then when we get to Paul things get complicated. Now we have Paul saying at first what sure sounds like the idea that, just Adam’s sin caused everyone to be condemned, Jesus’s death and resurrection reverses this for everyone. But then in 1 Corinthians he gives a list of sins that suggest that people who do the things on the list will not “inherit the kingdom.” BUT then in Ephesians, we have the statement that by faith, not by works, people are saved - which fits with Acts, though in Acts Paul and Silas affirm that the whole household will be saved with the believing jailer. However, bringing up the rear, James tells us that faith has to be accompanied by works in order to be saved. Still, James does not mention Torah, which is the standard of works assumed in Matthew.

My point is that this is looking a lot more complicated than the “sinner’s prayer” model we can find at our local tract store. To be controversial, they simply cannot all be equally true. The role of works is contested throughout this, and the standard of works is different from place to place. What about a drunk who feeds and clothes the least of Jesus’s siblings? Does he inherit the kingdom, or not? What is the role of grace? Would James agree God has grace for a person who is saved by faith but has no works? It doesn’t seem so, which sits uncomfortably alongside Ephesians. What should we do about the Torah? What about someone who feeds and clothes Jesus’s brothers and sisters but never believes Jesus is Lord? It certainly seems plausible, given that the surprise of the saved “sheep” indicates they have never heard this parable.

Why does the jailer’s faith save his whole family? If his wife never believes in Jesus in her heart even though she submits to baptism, is she saved? What if everyone is saved anyway, which is a plausible reading of the Adam typology in Romans?

The point is, there are some real inconsistencies we need to attend to to read the New Testament. My advice is not to chuck the whole thing and say that it is clearly hopeless. However, you — yes, you — need an interpretive strategy to make all this into a coherent theology.

My goal here is not to prescribe one. This will be a project for a later date. However, my goal here is to make you notice that you do have one, and to think carefully about what it is.

Part 2: How Do You Read This?

One method you might try is what we might very loosely call the Lutheran reading: divide the passages into law/gospel and framed some of these texts as an awareness of what you should do but are not capable of doing. So, we are all supposed to not commit the sins on Paul’s list, or Jesus’s list, but the reality is that we are not going to be able to do that. Instead, we confess that Jesus is Lord, per Ephesians, and accept the free gift of grace.

This is a very common American Christian reading. However, a downside of this reading is that this is clearly not the intended purpose of some of these texts. There is no indication in Paul or Matthew that you will not be able to not commit these sins. Another downside is the interiority and individuality of this reading, which doesn’t fit with the Acts passage. If the jailer’s wife and kids don’t believe, does this corrupt the Acts data? Furthermore, this reading must come externally from the text itself. There is no section in Matthew or Paul where we are told that these instructions are supposed to make us throw ourselves on Jesus’s mercy rather than try to keep them. It is hard to square sola scriptura with this reading.

Another option would be the “Red Letter” method - prioritize the quotes of Jesus over the rest of these. Jesus’s words suggest that salvation is for the generous and compassionate and excludes the wealthy. We might still find some place for “faith” in this system (indeed, “faith” is a catchword in several of the Gospels — Matt 15:28, Mark 10:52, etc) but this is part of obeying Jesus and doing what he says. The focus is still on works.

This is another popular strategy in American Christianity. The problem here is that we still have the sticky problem of what to do with the whole Law, which Jesus insists that he upholds in the Matthew 5 passage and then goes on to exegete in extremely careful and exacting detail. And besides, it’s hard to get American Christians excited about throwing out “grace,” which is language that primarily comes from Paul (though it appears in the first chapter of John).

Another option is to go with what we might call the Liberationist Reading - the preferential option for the poor and marginalized. The texts are embraced insofar as they contribute to the project of protecting the weak and resisting the powerful. So this reading might accept Paul in 1 Corinthians up to the point of his language about homosexuality and would prioritize the wealth-centered teachings in the Gospels and James. Again, we are still stuck with the fact that this doesn’t entirely sum up Matthew’s project. Matthew is concerned about the poor, but his teachings on the Torah are more extensive than this. Likewise, in its more simple forms, this reading runs the risk of setting aside christology (though not always), which is a predominant theme in the Gospels and Paul.

Another frankly popular reading in the US is the Traditionalist Sexual Ethic Reading, which is that of all the passages the only relevant part is the one that mentions homosexuality. The important thing is that gay people go to hell, regardless of whether they feed and clothe Jesus’s siblings (as in Matthew), and straight Christians go to heaven (even if they are greedy and slanderous). This reading would set aside most of these texts and focus on the issues that are most relevant to the construction of traditional American gender and sexuality, which includes only part of 1 Corinthians. This has the significant downside of subordinating faith and grace to sexual and gender expression - which is not under consideration in the vast majority of Paul’s words, and indeed makes Jesus all but irrelevant.

As I have said here, all these readings have significant downsides. They all depend on extrabiblical systems of knowledge (including the authority of the reading strategy itself) and they all require setting aside some or all of the texts. However, there is no reading strategy where you can simply take all the information on board with equal weight. Everyone has a reading strategy. Everyone has a hermeneutic. No one gets their hermeneutic straight from the Bible.

My encouragement as a starting point, and especially if you want to carefully consider your hermeneutic, is to look at these passages and see which ones seem to be informing you the most. What do these passages have in common? What about the ones that don’t influence you? Is this giving you a sense of what your criteria is? How would you evaluate your criteria?

Part 3: Bad News, Things Are About to Get So Much Worse

As I said in the beginning, I was going to use the NIV in all cases just to keep things simple.

But that’s where I was actually papering over some significant problems.

The bad news is, your reading might not work as well as you think it does.

Let’s go back to Matthew 25. The passage says that all the “nations” are gathered before Jesus at the final judgment. What’s a nation? The word for “nations” here is ἔθνη. This can mean a nation or a people group, but it also is a word for “gentiles” - that is, anyone who isn’t Jewish. Which translation is preferable? Will the nations be judged collectively for their care of Jesus’s “brothers and sisters?” Or just non-Jews? Or “non-Jewish nations?” Who are the brothers and sisters of Jesus? They clearly are in some kind of dire need, which suggests they aren’t simply Christians. Are they a kind of Christian? Are they all the poor? Are they poor Christians? Are Jews not subject to the judgment?

These are all questions that are hotly contested in the church and New Testament scholarship, stretching back hundreds of years. There are no easy answers. (Believe me, a section of my dissertation was on this passage. It’ll make your head spin).

What is faith? Acts seems to think that belief is something we do - we have faith in Jesus. But what if that’s not the only reading?

The phrase “faith in Christ” is a translation that comes from the words πίστις Χριστοῦ (and I probably got the accents wrong, sorry Greek heads, I will never get this right). The word πίστις means faith, or faithfulness. Χριστοῦ is a genitive form of “Christ,” which basically means “of Christ.”

This is the infamous subjective genitive/objective genitive problem. So to use another example, let’s talk about the phrase “the fear of Laura.” There are two ways we can read that phrase. We can read it “subjectively,” which means that “Laura” is the subject of the fear - the fear Laura feels. So in this reading, the fear of Laura would be “Laura’s fear” - of snakes or spiders or something like that.

The other option is that we can read this “objectively” - i.e., Laura is the object of the fear. So in this case, “the fear of Laura” would be “the fear someone feels concerning Laura,” because they are terrified of her.

Sometimes, subjective or objective genitive is not hard to figure out. No one thinks “the fear of God” means “the fear God fears.” But what about “the love of God?” Does that mean love for God, or God’s love? The phrase can go both ways, depending on context.

So to bring this back to the “faith/faithfulness of Jesus” - are you saved by your faith in Jesus in Gal 2:16? Or are you saved by the faithfulness of Christ - that is, his faithful work on the cross to redeem humanity? The reading can go both ways.

These are just two examples that complicate the readings of this passage. Again, my goal here is not to say that Bible interpretation is hopeless and no one should attempt it without years of scholarship. My point is simply that interpretation is very complicated and highly contested, and we need to appreciate the difficulty that goes into understanding how these debates form and change over time.

But just as importantly - as Christians, it’s easy for us to go through our lives and not even realize interpretive decisions are made for us. You might not have even noticed before today that you have a reading strategy. But you do! Our goal as Christians shouldn’t be to throw out everything or give everything over to qualified experts, but to attend to the ways in which we are making decisions and the authorities that might be making decisions you don’t know about.

Your Bible, and your reading strategy, and your interpretation, and the words of the text came from somewhere. That isn’t a bad thing - likely everyone involved in giving you this framework for your faith worked really hard at it. But there is tremendous value in understanding where these things come from and reflecting carefully and critically on our practices.