The following statement is grounded in the hermeneutical method developed in our series on reading the Bible honestly — taking the text seriously, not literally; honoring faithful witnesses while acknowledging their human limitations; and holding with confidence what the consistent threads of the canon affirm, while holding with humility what remains genuinely open. Preamble We…
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…
In my last post I walked through what the biblical authors were actually trying to say — to their actual audiences — on topics like creation, slavery, abortion, monotheism, and homosexuality. The exercise was clarifying. But there’s a dimension of honest Bible reading that almost nobody applies consistently, and it cuts even deeper than word…
Every debate about what the Bible “says” eventually runs into the same wall: whose interpretation? The conservative says the text is clear. The progressive says context changes everything. Both sides quote scripture. Both sides are confident. And somehow they come out on completely opposite ends. I’ve been digging into a book called The Bible Says…
