Sins of Biblical Interpretation

I am an unabashed Bible nerd. There are few things that I enjoy as much as reading the Bible and discussing it with like minded people. I love reading anything that’s connected to studying the Bible. Whether it’s Hebrew word studies or historical context of the Roman Empire in the early church era, or profiles on Persian kings. I insisted on reading a selection of my favorite Psalms in children’s church when I was in the third or fourth grade, and my “True Love Waits” Bible, an NIV study bible with copious footnotes and commentaries with the primary concern of convincing teenage kids to save sex for marriage, was riddled with highlights and dog-eared pages from long hours of reading trying to determine what I was “Supposed To Do.”

Now, as an adult approaching my forties, I still have a deep love for the Bible and for the Jesus I met through it. However, there are a number of things that have changed in my perspective of Scripture and the way we approach it within the Church. Specifically, I have some grievances on how I think we’ve often approached the Bible in a way that’s mistaken and in some cases dishonest. I intend to air some of those grievances here. 

I should stop and offer a caveat. Many of my complaints about how we approach the Bible are limited to the specific subset of Christian community in which I have grown up. White, Midwestern American churches of a primarily Evangelical bent, often with a heavy influence from the Fundamentalist movement, are the primary experience I’ve had of the church for most of my life. Indeed, growing up in this movement, I was often led to believe that it encompassed the whole of Christianity, and everything from the Book of Acts through the Protestant Reformation was leading specifically to that point as “God’s Will.” We often supported missionaries who would go to far flung countries like England and Germany, because they so desperately needed to hear the “True Word of God” instead of the supposedly sinful versions of Christianity they’d been fed by mainstream Western denominations. I actually believed as a young adult that I had a fairly broad experience of Christianity because my family had moved from a more pentacostal denomination to a more evangelical one when I was younger, so you know, I knew some things. 


Even in college, studying the history of Christianity did little to disabuse this notion, because the Restoration Movement college I went to again had a triumphalist view that saw their particular interpretation of Christianity as the true goal of God, and thus the direction all of Christianity was headed towards. Anything else was false Christianity, or at least not good enough. A broader and more honest study of the history of Christianity and the wider more global church shows this to be a lie. Understanding the traditions of mainline Western denominations, the deeper roots of the Roman Catholic Church, and not to mention the views of the Eastern Orthodox traditions, all give a different view which have their own struggles, yet often seem to avoid the very pitfalls of my own church experience. So for the purposes of this discussion, I restrict myself to speaking to that portion of the church which I have had a direct interaction with. If you haven’t seen these issues in your own experience, you can rest well in knowing I’m probably not talking about you. But I hope what I have to say is still useful and enlightening.

While there are a number of issues I see in this part of the Christian world I have lived in, today I want to call out two specific issues with Biblical interpretation I have so often seen. These are fairly basic stumbles that I hope, if explained correctly, can be understood and agreed with by even the most conservative traditionalist. We can use these as a starting point for any further conversation. I choose to call them “sins” of Biblical interpretation, because I think that’s often what sin is. A misunderstanding of the healthiest way to live life. Very rarely is it an intentional choice by the person who’s sinning. I think most people that make these particular errors never even stop to realize they’re doing it. Instead, the culture and the systems they grew up in completely normalized this behavior and they’ve been so inundated with this mindset that they’ve never really stopped to question it. And really, that’s a fairly accurate description of more sins than I’d care to count.

The first issue, the one that probably makes me cringe the most in church when listening to otherwise well written and reasoned sermons, is to insist on something the Scripture never really says. The fact is, the Bible isn’t really written in a style we would expect if one were trying to write a manual or instruction booklet for life. There are few set lists of proscribed behaviors outside of the Mosaic law, and even those mostly deal with factors of life that don’t relate to our modern age. There’s no specific verse that mentions how much screentime is allowed for Facebook, or even whether it’s permissible to be on Twitter or not. As such, rarely do Christians read the books of the Bible with a fresh set of eyes. Instead, we often go in with preconceived notions and context added by years of sermons and popular books. Most Christians are lucky if they have the time and motivation to read the Bible at all, let alone digging into the background or historical context. We rely on teachers who lead us, who in turn relied on the teachers who led them. We’ll take authorship as an easy example. Many Christians would get angry and defensive if you bring up the idea that the Gospel of Matthew may not have been written by specifically the Apostle Matthew. But the actual text never makes that claim. It never makes any claim whatsoever about who the writer is beyond the title, which was probably added by a later person anyway. And even then, it merely has the name “Matthew” attached. The writer never claims to have been an apostle or even a direct eyewitness. Hebrews is another similar culprit. Few things will curl my hairs as quickly as hearing a preacher refer to the book as “Paul’s letter to the Hebrews.” Again, not once does the text make such a claim. What’s more, there’s a strong set of evidence that it’s anyone but Paul writing. Yet because of a whole set of notions and loose traditions, we hear people make these statements as clear facts from the pulpit, often with little or no acknowledgement of the ambiguity of such statements. 

You might say this is a small or meaningless matter. After all, who cares if Paul wrote the book of Hebrews? The question of its authorship may have mattered to those who decided to allow the book into the canon of Scripture, but with that decision made, we’re not going to really need to dig into it. It may matter for those who want to do word studies and may choose to argue that the use of “pistis” in Hebrews 11 may relate to the same word usage in 1 Corinthians 12, but it’s not likely to matter to most people sitting down for an afternoon reading plan. But the problem is when we make such “factual” statements, particularly when they are made from the pulpit, we create a scenario where a halfway savvy skeptic points out that the Bible itself never even makes that statement, and suddenly you have a parishioner questioning everything else that’s been said in their local church. What’s more, we miss the opportunity to embrace the wonders of not knowing something. These are small tests of faith where we can say “You know what? I don’t know, the Bible never says, but I have enough faith to read what IS said here and deal with that instead.” We can recognize that there are a lot of things in life we will never know or completely understand, and that is okay. 

Another “sin” is to forget that the Bible is not a singular book and that it was not written in recent times. We have little to no experience reading truly ancient texts in our day to day lives, and while modern translations of the Scriptures are helpful, it makes it easier to forget that the absolute newest sections of the Bible are still almost two thousand years old. When we read a Shakespearean play, we immediately know we’re reading something set in “olden times” and thus come to the text with an open mind and questioning heart about certain turns of phrase. But when we read something like the Psalms, we immediately forget that we’re reading something that is far far older than Hamlet, and while it might express emotions or struggles that are very timely for our lives today, we still are getting this small window into a very different world. We read Psalm 51 and forget that “purge me with hyssop” is very much connected with sacrificial practices of the ancient temple, and once part of daily life. We read Genesis and try to construct guidelines for dating from the story of Eliezar choosing Rebecca as a wife for Isaac, while forgetting that the events depicted are at least several thousand years old and originate in a society with a very different place for men and women, and a marriage institution with an almost alien form compared to even our most traditional of family units. 

Perhaps more debatably we fall into the trap of only reading those parts of the Bible that we are comfortable with. I think of CS Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters” when one of the demon characters brags of having convinced a local parson to deviate from the set liturgical readings to “Shake things up” but instead has fallen into a rhythm of only reading a handful of favorite passages, thus ensuring that his parishioners will never hear anything new or challenging while seated in those pews. We have a deep love for a triumphalistic reading of Scripture, believing “God will never give you more than you can handle” while ignoring the faithful Christians over the centuries that have been executed or starved to death. We teach that Romans 13 means you should always obey the government and respect the police, but ignore that the Bible was written for all the world, and we may not feel as comfortable with that application if we’re teaching the Scripture to someone in Iran or Communist China. We have little room left in our weekly worship for the sorrow of Lamentations or the anger of Job, let alone the questioning of Ecclesiastes. Instead, we repeat the Romans road, along with a sterilized version of both the Christmas and Easter stories. If you listen to most churches, Jesus was born, then died, and then Paul delivered all the teaching, with a few Jewish books somewhere in the background. 

You’ll note I’ve avoided giving a total number for this list, and in edits I avoided the word “finally,” because I don’t believe this is a complete or exhaustive delineation of the errors we are subject to in our approach to the Bible. Rather, these are the glaring points that have most often aggravated me over my years, and I have no doubt new ones will bother me within a few days. But I hope by stopping to point some of these out I can help others begin the process of questioning what they’ve assumed and learn to ask more interesting questions of the Bible. And more importantly, more interesting questions of the God the Bible introduces us to.