Taking the Bible Seriously (Not Literally): A Framework for Honest Engagement
Imagine someone who attended a football game and later tried to describe it to you. They were there. They saw real things that really happened. Their description is genuine and valuable. But they’re limited by where they were sitting, what they noticed, how much of the game they understood, and whether they have the vocabulary to capture what they saw. Someone sitting on the other side of the stadium describes the same game differently. Both are telling the truth. Neither has the complete picture. The game itself is real and whole. Every description of it is partial.
Now scale that to an encounter with an infinite God.
The gap between the event and the description isn’t a little larger. It’s categorically different. A human being encountering the living God and then putting that encounter into words — constrained by their language, their culture, their historical moment, their conceptual categories, their limited understanding of what they just experienced — that person is doing the only thing any human being can do: describing something that infinitely exceeds their capacity to fully capture it.
This is the foundation for reading the Bible honestly.
Faithful Witnesses, Not Perfect Transcripts
The authors of the biblical texts were men and women of God. That framing matters. They were genuinely encountering the real God. Their descriptions are faithful — they were doing their best, not making things up, not constructing mythology. But faithful and complete are not the same thing.
Every description they gave was shaped by the limits of who they were. Culture. Language. Historical moment. The moral development of their community. The conceptual categories available to them. The ancient Israelite author writing about creation didn’t have the vocabulary for what we now know about the age of the universe. He had the categories of his world — order versus chaos, light versus darkness, the rhythm of days — and he used them to describe something real: God as the source of all order and life. That’s faithful. It’s also limited. Demanding that it be a geology textbook is asking it to be something it was never trying to be.
This applies across everything — cosmology, ethics, law, theology. God was genuinely at work in these people’s lives. Their descriptions of that work are genuine. They are also embedded in every limitation that comes with being human in a particular place and time.
This doesn’t make the text less valuable. It makes it exactly what it is: irreplaceable testimony from real people about real encounters with a real God.
The Consistent Threads
The Bible isn’t consistent on cosmology, afterlife, monotheism, or sexual ethics. But there are threads that run through virtually every author, every era, every genre. Care for the poor and vulnerable. The weight of justice over ritual correctness. Human beings as bearing the image of God. The obligation to the stranger and the outsider.
And one that appears more consistently than almost any other: the mandate to protect and provide for widows and orphans — the people with no economic power, no legal advocate, no one to speak for them. From the Covenant Code in Exodus to the Psalms to Isaiah to Malachi to the letter of James — across a thousand years of authors who disagree on almost everything else — this thread never breaks. God defends the fatherless and the widow. His people are required to do the same. That consistency is not culturally relative. It tells you something about the character of the God these authors were all, in their limited ways, trying to describe.
These consistent threads are not your escape from wrestling with difficult texts. They are the character of the One you are wrestling with. When a specific law or historical event seems to cut against human dignity, the consistent threads are how you locate your bearings — not by overriding the text, but by placing it in the full context of what the whole witness says about who God is.
Read the Historians With the Prophets
One of the most common reasons the historical books feel morally troubling is that people read them in isolation. The historical authors — Samuel, Kings, Chronicles — were recording what happened. They weren’t always editorializing. They weren’t always inserting God’s commentary. They were doing what historians do: narrating events, causes, and consequences.
But the prophets were active during the same periods. And the prophets are where God’s heart is made explicit.
Read 2 Kings and watch the northern kingdom spiral through idol worship, injustice, and oppression of the poor. It can feel like God is absent or silent. Now read Amos and Hosea — prophets preaching to Israel during that same period. Suddenly God isn’t silent at all. He is furious. He is grieving. He is condemning in the most vivid terms the exploitation of the poor, the corruption of justice, the empty religious ritual masking deep moral rot. “I hate, I despise your religious festivals,” God says through Amos. “Away with the noise of your songs.” That’s not silence. That’s anguish.
Read 2 Kings 16 and watch Ahaz lead Judah into idolatry and political compromise. Then open Isaiah 1 alongside it. God’s response is immediate and searing — he condemns the injustice, the neglect of widows and orphans, the hands full of blood lifted in hollow worship. The historical text recorded what Ahaz did. Isaiah recorded what God thought about it.
The book of Judges is perhaps the starkest example. It is one of the most morally disturbing books in the entire Bible — cycles of violence, sexual atrocity, tribal warfare, and a refrain that becomes a kind of despairing explanation: everyone did what was right in their own eyes. God can seem absent. But read the prophets who follow and the long consequences of exactly this kind of communal moral failure come into sharp focus. The silence of Judges is not God’s indifference. It’s the silence before the storm of prophetic condemnation that follows.
This matters enormously for honest Bible reading. The historical authors were faithfully recording events. The prophetic authors were faithfully describing God’s response to those events. Both are necessary. Neither alone gives you the complete witness. When you read history and God seems absent or tolerant of something terrible, ask: who was the prophet at that moment? What was God saying through them? The answer almost always fills the silence — and reveals a God who was neither absent nor indifferent, but speaking with great urgency to people who largely weren’t listening.
The historians tell you what happened. The prophets tell you what it meant. Read them together.
The Gap Is the Point
Jacob wrestled with God through the night and the next morning said: I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been preserved.
That is a man faithfully describing as best he could what God was doing in his life. It’s not systematic theology. It’s not a complete account. It’s testimony — compressed, raw, shaped by the limits of what human language can do with a night like that. He walked away with a new name and a limp. Both of those details tell you more than a doctrinal proposition could.
The name Israel means one who wrestles with God. That’s not incidental. It’s definitional. The community formed around these texts was defined from the beginning not by having the answers but by being in genuine, costly, unresolved engagement with a God who exceeds every description they could give of him.
This is the posture the text itself calls us into. Not certainty. Not resolution. Wrestling.
Progressive Revelation: The Game Develops
The witnesses weren’t all describing the same moment. They were spread across centuries, each watching a different period of the same game as the score developed, the strategy evolved, and more of the full picture came into view.
This is progressive revelation. God reveals himself over time, paced by human capacity to receive it. Early Israelite religion was henotheistic — Yahweh is our God, other gods exist. By the exilic prophets, philosophical monotheism has emerged. That shift didn’t happen because the early authors were lying. It happened because more was being revealed and more was being understood.
Jesus said it plainly: I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. Even his disciples standing in front of him couldn’t receive everything. Revelation has always been paced by human capacity. That’s not a flaw — it’s how communication between an infinite God and finite creatures works.
The contradictions between biblical authors aren’t embarrassments to paper over. They’re the natural result of a community’s understanding deepening across centuries. The tradition held the tensions without resolving them because the conversation wasn’t finished.
Our Understanding Is Probably Wrong
Here is the honest implication of everything above: our own understanding of God — right now, in 2026, with all of our theology and biblical scholarship and centuries of accumulated tradition — is also limited by our culture, our language, our historical moment, and the concepts available to us.
Many things we currently think about God are probably incomplete. Some are probably flat out wrong in ways we can’t yet see, just as the henotheistic authors couldn’t see what the exilic authors would come to understand. Humility isn’t optional here — it’s built into the nature of what we’re doing when we talk about an infinite God.
This should make us slower to claim certainty. Slower to weaponize the text. Slower to end a conversation with “the Bible says so” as though the matter is fully settled.
Seriously, Not Literally
Taking the Bible literally means flattening every text into the same genre — treating poetry as geology, law as timeless universal ethics, apocalyptic vision as newspaper reporting. It destroys the text by demanding it be something it never claimed to be.
Taking the Bible seriously means honoring what each witness was actually doing. A poet expressing wonder. A lawgiver governing a specific community. A prophet confronting power. A letter-writer addressing a crisis in one church. A historian explaining why things went wrong. It means letting the text have authority over you rather than just validating what you already believe. It means staying in the wrestling instead of reaching for a quick resolution.
Sufficient for Its Purpose
Here is the anchor that holds the framework together and keeps it from collapsing into relativism:
The Bible is sufficient.
Not exhaustive. Not a complete account of everything God is or has done. Not a lookup table for every moral question. But sufficient — sufficient to know this God, sufficient to enter into relationship with him, sufficient to understand what he has done in human history, sufficient to be found and saved by him.
The witness doesn’t have to be perfect to be enough for its purpose. The football fan’s description of the game doesn’t capture everything — but it’s enough for you to know a real game happened, who played, and what it meant. The biblical authors’ descriptions of their encounters with God don’t capture everything — but they are enough to find him, know him, and be changed by him.
Applying the Framework: What It Actually Produces
This isn’t an abstract method. Here is what it produces when applied to the specific issues covered in this series.
Creation
The Priestly author faithfully used the cosmological categories of his world to say something true: God is the source of all order and life, and creation is good. Take that theological claim seriously. Don’t demand the sequence be geology. The wrestling isn’t about six literal days — it’s about what it means that an infinite God considered creation worth making.
Inspiration
The 2 Timothy author made a genuine claim: these texts are useful for formation, correction, and training in righteousness. Take that seriously — the Bible has real authority to shape who you are. Don’t take it as a claim about mechanical dictation or exhaustive accuracy the author never made. The wrestling is about what it means for limited human testimony to carry divine authority.
Slavery
Every biblical author assumed slavery as a legitimate institution. That’s a faithful witness to where God was working within the moral limits of their world. The consistent thread of protection for the vulnerable, taken to its conclusion, is incompatible with owning human beings. That conclusion required centuries of wrestling to arrive at.
As for why God didn’t command abolition directly — we can speculate. Commanding Israel to unilaterally abandon an institution practiced by every surrounding nation would have placed them at a severe economic and political disadvantage. God working within the practical realities of a people trying to survive and maintain coherence as a nation is consistent with how the text portrays him working throughout the canon. But we don’t actually know that’s the reason. We cannot be dogmatic about the silence. What we can say is that the trajectory of the texts moves consistently toward greater protection of the vulnerable — and that trajectory is data, even when the destination isn’t fully reached within the canon itself. The same canon that never outlaws slavery never wavers on this: the powerless have a claim on the powerful, and God is watching.
Corporal Punishment
The Proverbs author gave practical wisdom from within his cultural framework about discipline forming character. Take seriously: formation requires correction and sometimes consequences that are genuinely uncomfortable. Don’t take literally: beating children with a rod is the one divinely mandated method. Wrestling: what does faithful, loving formation of a child actually look like?
Abortion
The Covenant Code author described a legal framework where a fetus had different legal status than a born person. Take seriously: the text shows human life before birth carries weight. Don’t take as exhaustive: the author wasn’t writing a complete theology of personhood. Wrestling: what does the image of God mean for developing human life? The text opens the question. It doesn’t close it.
Rape
The Deuteronomy author described legal protection within a framework where women had property status. Take seriously: even within that limited framework, the author was building in protections and a concept of harm. Don’t take as eternal law. The trajectory from “property crime against the father” to “crime against the person” is the direction the consistent threads point. What does the image of God in every human being require?
Asherah and Early Israelite Religion
Early authors faithfully described religious experience within a framework that included other divine beings. Progressive revelation accounts for the move toward monotheism. Take seriously: the community was genuinely encountering the living God even while their theological categories were incomplete. Wrestling: what does it mean that God worked through and within a tradition that got significant things wrong on its way to getting them right?
Child Sacrifice
The renegotiation from apparent early sacrifice commands to explicit condemnation is progressive revelation in action — God working a community away from something over generations. Take seriously: the binding of Isaac and the texts that follow are doing real theological work about what God does and doesn’t want. Wrestling: what does it mean that the tradition preserved both the early command and its reversal without pretending the tension wasn’t there?
Monotheism
The development from henotheism to monolatry to monotheism is the clearest example of progressive revelation in the canon. Each author faithfully described their understanding of God. Take seriously: every one of them was pointing toward the same God even with incomplete categories. Wrestling: if our understanding developed that dramatically across the canon, in what ways might our current understanding still be incomplete?
Satan
The development from “the adversary” as a prosecutorial role to a personal cosmic enemy of God reflects a community wrestling across centuries with the problem of evil. Take seriously: evil is real, has a character, and is not simply identical with human failure. Don’t proof-text a complete demonology from texts spanning a thousand years of developing thought. Wrestling: what does it mean to take evil seriously without making it a second god?
God’s Body
Early authors used anthropomorphic language because that was the faithful vocabulary of their encounter — God walks, speaks, shows his back to Moses. Take seriously: this language captures something real about the personal nature of God’s engagement with creation. Don’t take literally: God has a physical body exactly like a human’s. Wrestling: how do you talk faithfully about the personal nature of an infinite God without either flattening him into human form or abstracting him out of relationship entirely?
Hell and the Afterlife
No single author had a complete theology of what happens after death. Sheol, Gehenna, Hades, resurrection — each author described their understanding faithfully. Take seriously: the consistent thread is that choices have weight, justice is real, and death is not the end of the story. Don’t build a precise geography of the afterlife by combining texts written centuries apart in completely different genres. Wrestling: what does eternal justice look like for a God who is simultaneously holy and merciful?
The Virgin Birth
The Isaiah author was faithfully addressing a political crisis for King Ahaz. The Matthew author was faithfully applying a Jewish interpretive method to describe what he understood about Jesus. Take seriously: Matthew believed something genuinely unprecedented happened in the incarnation. Don’t take literally: Isaiah 7:14 was a direct prediction about Jesus that bypasses its original context. Wrestling: what does the incarnation — God entering human limitation — mean when you engage it honestly rather than just defending a proof text?
Jesus’s Identity
Mark, Paul, and John each faithfully described their encounter with Christ from where they stood, in the categories available to them. The councils later formalized what the texts were pointing toward. Take seriously: something happened that consistently exceeded every normal human category every author tried to apply to it. Don’t take literally: any single author’s description is the final and complete account of who Christ is. Wrestling: who is this person, and what does it mean that every generation has had to wrestle with that question without fully exhausting it?
Homosexuality
This is the most contested topic in contemporary Christian ethics, so it deserves the most careful treatment. What follows applies the framework fully — asking what each author was saying, to whom, and why — and arrives at a conclusion that will frustrate both sides of the culture war equally. The Bible is not silent on same-sex behavior. It also does not categorically forbid homosexuality as an identity or orientation. The honest answer is narrower and more specific than either camp wants to acknowledge.
The Three Key Passages
The debate centers on three texts — Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Romans 1:26-27, and the word arsenokoitai in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10. These are sometimes called the “clobber passages.” What did each author actually say?
Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 — The Holiness Code
The Priestly author opens Leviticus 18 with an explicit framing: do not do what they do in Egypt or in Canaan. This is boundary-maintenance legislation — the author is defining Israel as a distinct people, not issuing a universal moral code for all humanity. The specific prohibition uses the Hebrew phrase mishkevei isha — literally “lyings of a woman.” The author is describing the act of a man being penetrated as a woman would be — a specific sexual act, not a category of identity or orientation.
In the ancient Near East’s honor-shame culture, this act was a profound status violation. It placed a man in the social position of a woman, which was understood as deeply degrading to his standing in the community. The author’s concern is with that specific status violation within his cultural framework — not with same-sex attraction as a psychological reality. The concept of a person being constitutively attracted to the same sex — having an orientation — simply did not exist in the author’s conceptual world.
What the Levitical author explicitly did not address: same-sex attraction as an orientation, non-penetrative same-sex acts between men, or anything involving women. The Holiness Code is entirely silent on female same-sex behavior. The death penalty in 20:13 applies to the specific act described. It cannot honestly be expanded to cover categories the author never mentioned without acknowledging you are doing something beyond what the text says.
Romans 1:26-27 — Paul’s Rhetorical Trap
Understanding Romans 1 requires understanding what Paul is structurally doing. He is constructing a rhetorical trap. Romans 1 paints a vivid picture of Gentile moral failure — his Jewish readers nod along in agreement. Then Romans 2:1 springs it: “You who judge do the same things.” Paul’s point is the universal sinfulness of humanity, Jew and Gentile alike. The same-sex behavior he describes in chapter 1 is illustrative material in a larger rhetorical argument — not the subject of a standalone sexual ethics treatise.
Paul’s key words are metallassō and aphiēmi — both conveying exchange or abandonment. He describes people who gave up the natural use of women, who exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. This is directional language. It describes people who made a wholesale departure from one thing in favor of another — present-tense heterosexuals who adopted same-sex behavior. The context is almost certainly the Roman aristocratic world Paul’s readers inhabited, where married men routinely engaged in same-sex acts with slaves, prostitutes, or social inferiors for pleasure or status — while maintaining their heterosexual marriages and family lives.
Paul draws on Stoic philosophical vocabulary that his Roman audience would have immediately recognized — kata phusin (according to nature) versus para phusin (against nature). In that framework, “natural” meant consistent with one’s created design and social role, not a biological claim about orientation.
Here is the critical implication: a man who has not exchanged or abandoned his heterosexual orientation — who maintains those relationships and has not made a wholesale departure — is not the person Paul’s language targets. Paul is describing a specific kind of behavior: the deliberate abandonment of one’s natural inclinations. A man who is bisexual or who maintains heterosexual relationships while also engaging in same-sex behavior has not made the “exchange” Paul describes. That is a significantly narrower target than a universal condemnation of any same-sex thought, attraction, or act.
Arsenokoitai — 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10
Paul apparently coined this word, combining the Greek words for “male” (arsen) and “bed” (koitē). It appears in vice lists — conventional catalogs of behavior incompatible with community life that both Jewish and Greco-Roman writers routinely used. The word is rare enough in ancient literature that scholars genuinely dispute its precise meaning.
What is notable: when early church fathers used arsenokoitai in their own writings, they consistently placed it in contexts of economic and sexual exploitation — abuse of power, coercive transactions, the sexual use of the vulnerable. This patristic evidence strongly suggests the word targeted exploitative same-sex behavior specifically — pederasty, male prostitution, the Roman practice of using slave boys sexually — rather than consensual relationships between adults. Malakoi, the word paired with it in 1 Corinthians 6:9, likely refers to the passive partner in a penetrative act — again, a specific role in a specific act, not a condemnation of orientation.
One historical fact cuts through the entire debate with particular force: the word “homosexual” did not appear in any Bible translation until 1946. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) was the first to render arsenokoitai and malakoi in 1 Corinthians 6:9 as “homosexuals.” Every prior translation used different language — the King James Version of 1611 rendered the passage as “abusers of themselves with mankind.” The very concept of homosexuality as a category of identity wasn’t coined until 1869, by the German writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny. Paul could not have been condemning something that would not be conceptualized for another 1,800 years. Whatever arsenokoitai meant to Paul and his audience, it was not a condemnation of homosexual identity — because that category did not exist in his world.
What Is and Isn’t Explicitly Prohibited
Applying strict authorial intent to all three texts, here is what is explicitly prohibited:
- Male anal penetration — explicitly addressed by the Levitical author within the Holiness Code’s purity framework
- Abandoning heterosexual orientation entirely — what Paul’s “exchange” language targets in Romans 1
- Sexual exploitation — what arsenokoitai most likely refers to, per the patristic evidence
- The passive penetrated role for men — what malakoi likely refers to in the Roman honor-shame context
Here is what is not explicitly addressed by any of these texts, read on their own terms: non-penetrative same-sex acts between men, same-sex behavior by a man who has not abandoned his heterosexual orientation, and same-sex behavior that is neither exploitative nor coercive. A male-male relationship that is non-penetrative, non-exploitative, and not exclusive — where the man maintains heterosexual relationships and has not made the “exchange” Paul describes — falls outside the explicit scope of every stated prohibition under strict authorial intent.
This is not a progressive conclusion imposed on the text. It is what the texts actually say with precision when you take each author’s specific language seriously. It is also not a blank check. The prohibitions that do exist are real. The honor of the text requires holding both of those truths simultaneously rather than collapsing them in either direction.
The Honest Wrestling
The framework we’ve been building through this series requires honesty here above all. Take seriously: the texts have real things to say about same-sex behavior. They address specific acts, specific contexts, specific violations of the community’s understanding of order and the vulnerable. Don’t take literally: “any same-sex attraction is sinful” is a category these authors never used and a conclusion that requires expanding their words well beyond what they wrote.
The wrestling is: what do the love of neighbor, the protection of the vulnerable, the image of God in every person, and the trajectory of the canon require when this question is engaged honestly today? The framework doesn’t produce a clean answer that satisfies either side. Both the person who says “the Bible clearly condemns all homosexuality” and the person who says “the Bible has nothing to say about it” are stopping the wrestling before it’s done. The honest position sits in the tension — taking what the texts actually say seriously, neither expanding nor dismissing it, and remaining in genuine engagement with the God these authors were all trying, in their limited ways, to describe.
Polygamy and Concubinage
The patriarchal authors faithfully described God working within a polygamous framework. The tradition never condemned it; later texts moved toward monogamy. Take seriously: the texts have real things to say about covenant, commitment, and the protection of the vulnerable within sexual relationships. Don’t take the silence on polygamy as timeless permission. Wrestling: what does the trajectory toward mutual, protected, covenantal relationship tell us about what God was working toward?
Pederasty and Sexual Exploitation
This is where the framework converges most clearly. The protection of the vulnerable runs through every era of the text. The specific condemnations of exploitative sexual behavior appear across multiple genres and authors. The image of God in every person — including the young and the powerless — is one of the canon’s most consistent threads. This is one area where authorial intent, the consistent threads, and the trajectory all point in the same direction without significant tension. Sexual exploitation of the vulnerable is incompatible with everything the canon consistently affirms.
What This Framework Is Not
It is not relativism — the idea that any interpretation is as good as any other. The consistent threads are real constraints. The trajectory is real data. The specific things authors did and did not say matter.
It is not the same as “whatever I think is morally right is what the Bible means.” The wrestling posture requires letting the text challenge you, not just confirm you. Some of what it says should disturb you. Some of the questions it raises should remain unresolved. That discomfort is the work.
What it is: an honest account of what the Bible actually is — faithful, limited, sufficient — and a framework for engaging it with the seriousness it deserves and the humility the subject demands.
You’re not trying to control the text. You’re trying to encounter the God it points toward.
Just like Jacob.
This is part three of a series on reading the Bible honestly. Part one covers what the biblical authors were actually saying on the most controversial topics. Part two covers the argument from silence and why it matters.
