Chapter 3: How to Read the Bible in This Book

If we are going to spend a whole book comparing what the Bible says to what a movement does, we owe it to ourselves, and to the Bible, to be honest about how we are going to read it. Otherwise the whole exercise turns into a game of pulling verses out of a hat, and both sides can play that game forever without either one getting closer to the truth.

I am not a seminary professor. I am not going to spend this chapter walking you through the finer points of biblical scholarship. There are wonderful books that do that, and I will point to some of them along the way. What I want to do here is simpler. I want to lay out, in plain language, the handful of reading habits I am going to use for the rest of this book, and to explain why I think they are fair.

If you disagree with any of them, that is fine. I would rather you know, up front, what I am doing than have you feel, three chapters from now, that I have been playing tricks on you. So consider this a set of ground rules. Six of them. None of them are original to me. All of them are the kind of thing careful readers of the Bible, from many traditions, have been saying for a long time.

Rule one: read the whole thing, not just the highlights

The first rule is the simplest, and it is the one the movement I described in the last chapter breaks most often. Read the whole Bible.

The Bible is a library. It is sixty-six books in most Protestant editions, seventy-three in most Catholic editions, seventy-eight or more in most Orthodox editions. It was written across roughly a thousand years, in three languages, by dozens of authors, on three continents, in every literary form human beings had invented at the time. It contains law codes, love poems, temple songs, war chronicles, family stories, prophetic speeches, letters, sermons, apocalyptic visions, and biographies. To read the Bible faithfully is to reckon with all of that.

What Conservative American Christianity tends to do, instead, is to build its picture of God out of a small set of favorite passages, repeated so often that they crowd everything else out. A handful of verses about sexual behavior. A handful of verses about submitting to authority. A handful of verses about hell. A handful of verses, torn from context, that seem to bless personal wealth. These verses do a lot of work. They form the backbone of countless sermons. They get printed on coffee mugs and posted on social media.

Meanwhile, the parts of the Bible that talk, at great length, about the treatment of the poor, the welcome of the foreigner, the danger of riches, the judgment against dishonest leaders, and the folly of pride are quietly skipped, or reinterpreted so gently that they lose their teeth. This is not accidental. It is what happens when a movement chooses its verses to fit its politics rather than letting the whole book form its politics.

So the first thing I will try to do in this book is to quote widely. When I want to know what the Bible says about wealth, I will not stop at one convenient verse. I will look at Deuteronomy, and Amos, and Isaiah, and the Psalms, and the Gospels, and James, and see what pattern emerges. When the pattern is overwhelming in one direction, I will say so. When the Bible itself is in tension with itself, and it sometimes is, I will say that too. What I will not do is pretend that four verses on one topic outweigh four hundred on another.

If the response to a book like this is "but you left out this verse," the honest answer will often be, "yes, and you left out those four hundred." The question is not whether a favorite verse exists. The question is what the whole library, taken together, is trying to say.

Rule two: context is not a trick

The second rule is that context matters, and paying attention to context is not a liberal trick to explain away the Bible.

Every verse in the Bible was written by someone, to someone, in a particular time and place, about a particular situation. A letter from Paul to a small church in Corinth in the middle of the first century was answering questions those Corinthians had asked. A prophetic oracle from Jeremiah was aimed at a specific king in a specific crisis. A law code in Leviticus was regulating a specific community trying to live in a specific land. None of that means the verses do not speak to us. It means we have to listen carefully before we assume we know what they are saying.

You cannot pull a single sentence out of a letter, ignore what came before and after it, ignore who was writing and who was reading, ignore what problem the writer was addressing, and then wave it around as a rule for all people in all times. That is not how any human being reads any other document. You would not treat an email from your boss that way. You would not treat a paragraph in the Constitution that way. And you should not treat the Bible that way.

Context includes the paragraph the verse sits in. It includes the chapter and the book. It includes the historical setting. It includes the literary form. A poem is not a legal statute. A parable is not a news report. An apocalyptic vision is not a policy paper. When we ignore these differences, we make the Bible say things it was never trying to say, and we miss what it was actually trying to say.

Context also includes the difference between what the Bible describes and what the Bible commands. The Bible describes many things it does not approve of. It describes polygamy, slavery, genocide, incest, murder, and every other human ugliness, sometimes carried out by its own heroes. The fact that a thing appears in the Bible does not mean the Bible endorses it. Sometimes the Bible is showing us what happened. Sometimes it is showing us what happened so that we would not do it again. Reading well means noticing the difference.

None of this makes the Bible harder to obey. It makes the Bible harder to weaponize. And those two things are not the same.

Rule three: Jesus is the center

The third rule is that when I read the Bible as a Christian book, and I do, I read it with Jesus at the center.

This is not a controversial claim inside Christianity. It is, in fact, one of the oldest Christian claims there is. The earliest followers of Jesus read their Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians now call the Old Testament, in the light of what they had come to believe about him. They saw the whole story pointing forward to him. And they took his teaching, his life, his death, and his resurrection as the clearest picture they had of who God is and what God is like.

If that is true, then Jesus is not one voice in the Bible among many equal voices. He is the voice that tells us how to hear the other voices. When the Old Testament and the words of Jesus seem to point in different directions, and sometimes they do, the church has, for two thousand years, followed Jesus. When Jesus says, "You have heard it said, but I say to you," he is not overthrowing the Scriptures. He is showing us what they were always trying to teach us. That is how Christians have read the Bible from the beginning.

This matters for the argument of this book, because a great deal of Conservative American Christianity does the opposite. It reaches past Jesus, past the Sermon on the Mount, past the parables, past the cross, and grabs something from the back of Judges or the middle of Joshua to justify what it wants to do. It quotes a war verse from a thousand years before Christ and treats it as a live instruction, while quietly ignoring the direct, red-letter command of Jesus on the very same subject.

That is not a Christian reading. That is not, at least, the reading Christians have historically claimed to do. A Christian reading holds every page of the Bible up to the face of Jesus and asks whether it looks like him. When it does, we lean in. When it seems not to, we do not throw it away, but we hold it more gently, and we let Jesus interpret it, not the other way around.

I will do that in this book. When I talk about violence, I will not pretend the wars of the Old Testament are not there. But I will not use them to overrule the Prince of Peace, either. When I talk about the foreigner, I will not skip the harder passages. But I will not let a stray verse crowd out the man who told the story of the Good Samaritan. Jesus is the center. If a reading of the Bible ends up making him embarrassing, or optional, or safely stored away in some other dispensation that does not apply to us, that reading is wrong.

Rule four: the Bible has a bias

The fourth rule is one that some readers may find uncomfortable, so I will state it plainly. The Bible has a bias, and the bias is toward the poor, the foreigner, the widow, the orphan, and the outsider.

This is not my opinion. It is what the Bible says about itself, over and over, in every kind of literature it contains. God hears the cry of the slaves in Egypt before they even know God's name. God writes into the law of Israel a repeated command to protect the vulnerable, sometimes phrased as "for you were foreigners in Egypt," a reminder that the people of God were, themselves, once the outsiders. God sends prophet after prophet to condemn kings and priests who grow fat while the poor go hungry. Jesus opens his public ministry by reading a passage from Isaiah about good news for the poor, freedom for the captive, sight for the blind, and release for the oppressed, and then says, in effect, that this is his job description. His mother, before he is even born, sings a song about God pulling down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the humble, sending the rich away empty and filling the hungry with good things.

This is not one theme among many. It is a drumbeat. It runs from Exodus to Revelation without a break. Any reading of the Bible that misses it is not reading the Bible. It is reading a smaller, safer book that has had that drumbeat edited out.

To say the Bible has a bias is not to say it does not care about anyone else. It says God loves everyone. The rich are not damned for being rich, the powerful are not condemned for holding power, the insider is not written off for being an insider. But God's attention, God's tenderness, and God's warning are distributed in a particular pattern, and the pattern tilts. It tilts toward the ones the world overlooks. When a religious movement's political and economic commitments happen to tilt the opposite way, that is worth noticing. That is, in fact, most of what this book is about.

Rule five: I will name my translations

The fifth rule is a practical one. The Bible was not written in English. It was written in Hebrew, in Aramaic, and in Greek. Every English Bible you have ever held is a translation, and every translation involves choices. Most of those choices are honest, careful, and made by teams of scholars who know their business. A few of them, over the centuries, have been less careful, and a few, as we saw in the chapter on the Slave Bible, have been outright dishonest.

For this book, I will mostly quote from translations that are widely used and widely respected: the New Revised Standard Version, the Common English Bible, the New International Version, and sometimes the Kings James, when the older language captures a rhythm the newer versions lose. When a translation choice matters to the argument, I will say so, and I will show you the alternatives. I will not pretend to be reading Hebrew or Greek fluently. I am not. But I know how to consult people who do, and I will do that work honestly.

If you use a different translation and want to check my quotations, please do. That is the point. A book like this is stronger when its readers have their own Bibles open next to it.

Rule six: the goal is truth, not victory

The last rule is the one I have to keep telling myself as I write.

The goal here is not to win an argument. It is not to embarrass the movement I have named. It is not to give people who already agree with me another set of clever lines to use on their relatives at Thanksgiving. It is to tell the truth as best I can, about a Book I take seriously and a movement I have watched carefully, and to invite anyone reading, on any side of this, to look with me.

That means I have to be willing to be wrong. If I misread a verse, I want to be corrected. If I misrepresent a position, I want to be called on it. If a reader comes to me and says, "you skipped this passage, and here is why it complicates your argument," I want to sit with that passage until I have understood it. That is what honest reading looks like. It is not comfortable. But it is the only reading worth doing.

I ask the same posture of you. If you belong to the movement I am describing, I am not asking you to abandon your faith. I am asking you to open the Book. Not the parts you already know. All of it. Read the prophets, all the way through, out loud, and ask whether the country you are hearing described sounds like the country your favorite preacher describes. Read the Sermon on the Mount, slowly, and ask whether the leader you are being told to defend actually resembles the kind of person Jesus said would be blessed. Read the book of James, in one sitting, and ask whether the version of Christianity you have been handed would recognize it. Then decide.

If you do not belong to the movement, I ask something of you too. Do not read this book as a permission slip to sneer at your neighbors. Do not use it to feel superior. The point of naming a false version of Christianity is not to give yourself a new tribe to look down on. The point is to make room, in a country that badly needs it, for the real thing.

What comes next

With the name in place, and the reading rules on the table, we are ready to start looking. In the next section of the book, Part II, we are going to look at how we got here. We are going to trace the ways American Christianity has been edited, adjusted, and rewritten over the centuries to serve particular agendas. We have already seen one example, the Slave Bible, in Chapter 4. There is more to say about the Jefferson Bible, more to say about the Scofield Reference Bible and the theology it built, more to say about the long American habit of tearing pages, quietly, out of the Book while claiming to hold it whole.

After that, in Part III, we will turn to the Bible itself, and let it speak in its own voice, one section at a time, from the Torah through the Prophets, the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles, and Revelation. We will see what picture emerges when we let the whole library speak.

Then, in Part IV, we will come to the specific contrasts: immigration, lying, vanity, boasting, wealth, violence, nationalism, and more. Each of those will be its own chapter. Each will place the Bible's words next to the movement's actions and let the reader see the gap.

Finally, in Part V, we will ask what a way back might look like. Not a way back to some imagined golden age of American faith, because there never was one, but a way forward into a Christianity that could stand, without embarrassment, next to the Book it claims.

That is the road. The name is set. The reading rules are set. Turn the page, and let us begin looking at how we got here.