Restoring Apostolic Faith

Precepts and presuppositions—few things weigh heavier on the conscience of anyone who tries to read honestly. We all have them; it’s nearly impossible to be human and not. Every experience, sermon, or inherited belief becomes a lens we don’t realize we’re wearing. Yet when reading most literature, we at least try to set those lenses down and let the author speak for himself. Only with Scripture do we reverse that courtesy.

It’s a strange paradox that the one book claiming divine authorship is the one most often forced to conform to the reader’s assumptions. The Bible, uniquely, is treated not as a unified conversation but as a patchwork of proofs—verses severed from their neighbors, tone forgotten, culture erased. In every other form of literature, we know better. If someone cut random lines from Homer to justify a political stance, we’d call it absurd. If a critic rearranged Hemingway to make him sound like a motivational speaker, we’d laugh. Yet when the same is done to Paul or Isaiah, many call it “Spirit-led.”

The Bible Treated Unlike Any Other Book

The modern reader doesn’t so much read Scripture as harvest it. A verse here, a phrase there—stitched together into a theological quilt more collage than canon.¹ Chapters and verses, originally introduced for navigation,² have trained generations to see each sentence as self-contained rather than part of an argument or story. The Gospel of Matthew thus becomes 1,071 isolated moments instead of one sustained testimony.³

Topical reading then compounds the problem. “What does the Bible say about fear?” “What does the Bible say about money?” The question assumes that meaning can be extracted atomically, without narrative. But Scripture doesn’t say about—it shows within. It reveals through tension, covenant, and character, not bullet points.⁴ To treat it otherwise is to dissect poetry with a spreadsheet—precise, but lifeless.

How We Read When We Forget How to Read

We would never tolerate such treatment of any other text. If someone claimed to understand The Iliadafter reading twelve random lines, we’d hand them the whole scroll and say, “Start over.” Yet Christians have grown comfortable pulling verses from context and forming doctrine upon them.

This is not contempt for devotion; it’s a lament for discipline. Many have mistaken emotional resonance for comprehension. When a verse “speaks to me,” that can be beautiful—but that’s not the same as understanding what it meant to those who first heard it.⁵ Meaning doesn’t float free from its author or audience.

Context is the oxygen of meaning. A phrase as simple as “you’ve done it again” can be praise or rebuke depending on its paragraph. But with Scripture, people freeze a verse mid-sentence, then declare its meaning final. The author’s flow of thought—his logic, tone, and rhythm—is lost.

Why Poetry Gets a Pass

Poetry invites multiple interpretations because it’s built for evocation, not exposition. Its ambiguity is art. Hebrew poetry, however, doesn’t aim for vagueness; it aims for depth. Its parallelism clarifies meaning through repetition and contrast.⁶ Even there, the goal is not to make truth optional but memorable. To claim “every verse means what it means to me” isn’t humility—it’s literary theft.⁷

The Double Trap: Precepts and Presuppositions

The trouble with precepts is that they often masquerade as reverence. “Scripture clearly teaches…” usually precedes a confession of tradition, not text.⁸ Presuppositions are subtler still—the quiet filters we apply before the Bible even speaks: God wouldn’t do that. Paul couldn’t mean that. These are not insights; they are restraints.

Real reading requires the humility to be offended. It means allowing Scripture to correct you before you correct it. The early Church understood this instinctively. Ignatius of Antioch urged believers to “be deaf when anyone speaks apart from Jesus Christ,”⁹ meaning apart from the apostolic witness itself. Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians, rebuked them not for lacking zeal but for reading pridefully, using Scripture “not as taught but as chosen to one’s own mind.”¹⁰ Polycarp, echoing Paul, warned that “whosoever perverts the oracles of the Lord to his own lusts is the firstborn of Satan.”¹¹ These early fathers read with the text, not into it.

The Verse Collector’s Creed

We’ve turned study into scavenger hunt. Instead of tracing redemption as a sweeping story, we look for verses to defend comfort. Psalms become therapy, Proverbs business advice, Revelation entertainment. Then when someone challenges the method, the verse-collector retreats behind piety: “The Holy Spirit told me what it means.”

Perhaps—but that same Spirit inspired the original author in a particular language, culture, and covenant. Meaning divorced from that anchor becomes chaos.¹² Everyone is right, no one is accountable, and Scripture becomes a mirror for the self.

Reading as Submission, Not Consumption

Real reading—especially of Scripture—is an act of submission. You sit under the text, not over it. You listen before deciding. You let ancient idioms and unfamiliar customs remind you that revelation wasn’t born in your century. That posture doesn’t make interpretation easy, but it keeps it honest.

The aim isn’t to purge every bias (impossible), but to confess and suspend them. When tempted to say, “This verse means to me,” pause and ask, “What did it mean to them?” That small reversal—from ego to empathy—is the beginning of hermeneutics.¹³

The Hermeneutic of Patience

Patience is the forgotten virtue of reading. We demand revelation fast and certainty yesterday. But Scripture unfolds in time. Each word leans on the next.

Take Paul’s letters: most were meant to be read aloud in one sitting. Hearing Romans that way, you’d sense the buildup of argument until chapter ten bursts not with a slogan for salvation but a summary of covenant loyalty. “Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart” assumes nine chapters of groundwork.¹⁴ Reading it as a one-line formula is like quoting the punchline without the joke.

Or consider the Gospels. Each is a portrait painted from a different angle—Matthew’s fulfillment, Mark’s urgency, Luke’s compassion, John’s divinity.¹⁵ Blend them prematurely and you lose the distinct melody each was written to play.

The Arrogance of Familiarity

The most dangerous reader is the one convinced they already know what the Bible says. Familiarity breeds blindness. We recite verses as slogans and forget they were once scandalous. “The meek shall inherit the earth” wasn’t poetic comfort—it was political subversion. “Take up your cross” wasn’t metaphor—it was a call to public shame. When Scripture feels too safe, you’re probably not hearing it anymore; you’re hearing yourself.¹⁶

Recovering Reverent Reading

To recover honest reading, we must unlearn a few habits:

1. Stop proof-texting. Let the passage breathe. Read before and after. Trace the argument.

2. Read whole books. The Bible was written as scrolls, not slides.

3. Respect the author’s world. Understand covenant, idiom, and setting before drawing application.

4. Let the hard parts stay hard. Wrestling is part of reverence.

5. Read in community. The faith that produced the text guards against private reinvention.¹⁷

When the Accuser Becomes the Accused

After all the slicing and stitching, those who mishandle Scripture often accuse others of not “believing the Bible.” It’s a strange inversion—those dismantling context claim to defend truth. But you cannot guard a text you refuse to understand. Reverence without literacy is noise in holy clothing.¹⁸

Letting the Author Speak Again

The cure is not elitism; it’s humility. We must once again approach Scripture as we would any author: listen first. Let the Bible be what it is, not what we wish it were. When we silence our preconceptions long enough, the text speaks with clarity we forgot was possible. It confronts, contradicts, and comforts—but always as it intends, not as we demand.

Only then do we begin to hear what God actually said.

Endnotes

1. Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 82–83.

2. Bruce M. Metzger, “The Division of the Bible into Chapters and Verses,” Bible Translator 15, no. 3 (1964): 150–55.

3. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 209–11.

4. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 19–21.

5. Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), 27–28.

6. Adele Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 13–14.

7. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 87.

8. James D. G. Dunn, The Living Word (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 52–53.

9. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 7.1, in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Bart D. Ehrman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

10. Clement of Rome, 1 Clement 13.1–2, in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. and trans. Michael W. Holmes, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).

11. Polycarp, Letter to the Philippians 7.1, in Holmes, Apostolic Fathers.

12. Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 39–40.

13. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 440–42.

14. Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 642–44.

15. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 124–26.

16. Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 98–100.

17. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.4.1, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885).

18. David F. Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 112.