If the Bible’s authority isn’t ultimately found in itself but in the One to whom it points, then what does it actually look like to read it faithfully? That’s the question I left hanging last time, and if I’m honest, it’s one I’m still learning how to navigate. For years I read the Bible the way you’d read an answer key. Start with a question, find the relevant entry, apply the answer, and move on with your day. It was a destination, a finished thing to be mastered and defended and quoted with just enough confidence to win a Sunday school argument. Learning to see it instead as a signpost has taken longer than I expected, and it’s been messier, because it meant loosening my grip on habits so old and so familiar that I couldn’t always tell where they ended and where the text itself began. I’d assumed, without anyone ever quite saying so, that there was really only one path to reading the Bible right, and that everything else was either a shortcut or a compromise. But I discovered far more paths than I’d have ever guessed, and certainly more than I could cover in a single post.¹⛰ Side Trail: Biblical interpretation has never followed a single method. Historical-critical scholars ask about authorship, sources, genre, and ancient context. Literary approaches examine narrative, poetry, symbolism, and how texts create meaning. Canonical interpretation reads individual passages within the shape of Scripture as a whole. Theological readings ask what texts disclose about God, humanity, and faith. Jewish interpretation brings its own long traditions of commentary and debate, while allegorical and spiritual readings have shaped Christian interpretation since the early church. Liberationist, feminist, postcolonial, and other contextual approaches ask how Scripture speaks from and into particular social locations. Each method brings different questions and notices different things. There are a few, however, that I’ve found particularly helpful in making sense of it all.²⛰ Side Trail: One framework that first helped me see Scripture differently came from Marcus Borg, whose threefold approach of reading the Bible historically, metaphorically, and sacramentally gave me language for possibilities I had barely considered. I encountered the idea at a point when I was beginning to realize that reading Scripture did not have to mean choosing between taking it seriously and taking it literally. Borg helped me see that these modes of reading could coexist. That Scripture could be engaged as an ancient collection of texts, as a world of meaning and metaphor, and as something capable of mediating an encounter with God. I’ll unpack each of these more fully in what follows.

The first was learning to read the Bible historically, and it began with a fairly humbling admission: this book wasn’t written to me. It was originally written to others, real people with real faces and real lives inside a real world I’d never bothered to picture. I grew up treating history as nothing more than background scenery, the set you glance past on your way to the point of the story, because what actually mattered was what a verse meant for me. It never occurred to me to ask what these words sounded like to the ears that heard them first, standing inside assumptions and questions I couldn’t even begin to guess at. I think some part of me believed that the Bible had simply skipped over all of that and landed directly in my lap. What finally cracked that belief open was letting those first hearers become real to me, rather than a simple formality standing between me and my own application. These days I find myself lingering with questions about who wrote a passage, and for whom, and what was happening in their world that made these specific words worth writing down and keeping. The strange part is that taking those questions seriously hasn’t made the text feel more distant. If anything, it’s made it feel more human than I ever let myself believe, more like something I could reach out and touch. And once I let myself take those questions seriously, I couldn’t stop the next question that followed close behind, because knowing who wrote a passage and to whom is only half of what history taught me.

The other half is what those people were actually doing when they wrote, and that’s what kept me inside the historical question longer than I expected. Because I used to think they were simply reporting what happened, and that reading historically meant treating the text as a straightforward record of events, a transcript of things more or less exactly as they occurred. But history has never simply been about what happened. It’s also just as much about how communities remembered it, interpreted it, shaped it, and carried it forward into new circumstances.³⛰ Side Trail: Modern historians distinguish between an event itself and the ways people later remembered and interpreted that event. Ancient communities rarely preserved history like modern recording devices. They selected memories, gave them meaning, connected them to older traditions, and retold them as circumstances changed. The same pattern appears throughout the Bible: Kings and Chronicles recount overlapping periods of Israel’s history with different emphases (2 Kings 18–20; 2 Chronicles 29–32), while the Gospels preserve overlapping traditions about Jesus with distinct arrangements and emphases. This doesn’t mean the underlying events were invented. It means that remembering history is itself an interpretive act, and that the way a community tells its story can reveal what that community believed the story meant. The deeper I looked at how ancient writers actually told their stories, the more I noticed something I’d missed for years: not every passage is recounting history the same way.⁴⛰ Side Trail: Ancient writers did not all recount the past in the same way, and biblical scholars pay close attention to those differences. Some passages read like annalistic records, emphasizing kings, battles, dates, and political events (2 Kings 18–20). Others preserve speeches or theological interpretation within a historical narrative (Deuteronomy 5:1–21; Nehemiah 9:5–37). The Gospels likewise combine remembered events with selective arrangement, speeches, symbolism, and theological framing (Mark 4:1–34; John 20:30–31). Biblical narratives can therefore function simultaneously as memory, interpretation, proclamation, and theological reflection. The question isn’t simply, “Did this happen?” but also, “What kind of history is this writer trying to tell, and what does the way it is told reveal about its purpose?” Some preserve collective memory.⁵⛰ Side Trail: Some biblical passages function as collective memory, stories communities preserved because they helped explain who they were and where they came from. The Exodus is the clearest example: Israel repeatedly retells its deliverance from Egypt as the foundational story of its identity (Exodus 12:24–27; Deuteronomy 6:20–25; Psalm 78:1–16). The point is not merely to preserve information about an ancient event, but to remember it together and transmit its meaning to the next generation. The same pattern appears in Israel’s retelling of exile and restoration (Lamentations 1–5; Ezra 9:5–15). These traditions function as communal memory, history carried forward because remembering the past helped shape how later generations understood themselves, their God, and their place in the world. Some interpret history theologically.⁶⛰ Side Trail: Some biblical writers interpret history through an explicitly theological lens, asking not only what happened, but what did it mean before God? Deuteronomy, for example, interprets Israel’s wilderness experience as a test of faithfulness and dependence (Deuteronomy 8:2–5). The books of Kings repeatedly interpret political disasters through Israel’s covenant relationship with God, explaining the fall of Jerusalem in theological rather than merely military terms (2 Kings 17:7–23; 24:18–20; 25:1–21). Chronicles retells much of the same history while emphasizing worship, the temple, Davidic kingship, and covenant faithfulness (2 Chronicles 6–7; 29–32). History, in these texts, becomes a way of interpreting God’s activity and Israel’s relationship with him. Some use poetry, symbolism, or literary artistry to convey what prose alone cannot.⁷⛰ Side Trail: Some biblical writers express historical memory through poetry, symbolism, and literary artistry rather than straightforward prose. The Song of the Sea, for example, retells Israel’s deliverance from Egypt through highly poetic language, celebrating God’s victory over Pharaoh and the forces arrayed against Israel (Exodus 15:1–18). Judges 5 similarly recounts the victory over Sisera in poetic form, emphasizing God’s intervention through imagery of the heavens, stars, and storm (Judges 5:4–5, 19–21). Psalm 78 retells Israel’s history through poetry, moving from the Exodus through the wilderness and into the establishment of David’s kingship (Psalm 78:1–72). Here, history is not abandoned; it is remembered and interpreted through a different literary form. Some are shaped to reveal something true about God or us that goes beyond simply reporting events, all inside assumptions their first readers would have taken for granted without a second thought.⁸⛰ Side Trail: Some biblical narratives are shaped to communicate theological truth through events rather than simply report those events. The creation accounts in Genesis, for example, present humanity, creation, and God’s relationship to the world within an ancient Near Eastern context very different from modern scientific categories (Genesis 1:1–2:3). Jonah uses the story of a reluctant prophet, a foreign city, and God’s unexpected mercy to confront assumptions about who deserves compassion (Jonah 1–4). Job similarly uses extended poetic dialogue and narrative framing to explore suffering, justice, and the limits of human wisdom (Job 1–2; 38–42). In such texts, the question is not only what happened, but what the story is trying to reveal about God, humanity, and the world. And that opened up a question I once would’ve been afraid to even whisper out loud, let alone chase down: can a story be true even if it didn’t happen the way it’s told?⁹⛰ Side Trail: Ancient historians often preserved what they understood as real history while shaping it into a meaningful narrative. The speeches attributed to historical figures, for example, were commonly crafted to express what the author believed a person or moment represented rather than recorded word-for-word (compare 1 Kings 8:22–53; 2 Chronicles 6:12–42). Biblical writers also arrange the same events differently: Kings and Chronicles tell overlapping stories with different emphases (2 Kings 18–20; 2 Chronicles 29–32), while the Gospels arrange Jesus’ teachings and actions differently (Matthew 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–48). Even Exodus 15 and Judges 5 retell events in poetic form. In each case, historical memory and literary shaping coexist. A story can preserve genuine history without functioning as a modern transcript of exactly how every detail unfolded. That question sat with me for years, refusing to be filed away, and it’s the one that finally pushed me into the next way of reading.

That next way of reading was learning to read the Bible metaphorically, an approach I initially resisted because I’d absorbed the idea that reading anything “metaphorically” was just a hedge, a softer way of saying “not really true.” What finally began to loosen my grip on that idea was noticing that I’d collapsed three different words into one: literal, factual, and true. In short, I’d assumed a literal reading was the only way to guarantee a passage was factual, and that being factual was the only way it could be true. All three rose or fell together.¹⁰⛰ Side Trail: If Genesis says God created the world in six days, a literal reading meant six ordinary days, which meant that a factual six-day creation was necessary for the account to be considered true (Genesis 1:1–31). If Noah’s flood is presented as covering the earth, then a literal reading of the story naturally became a factual claim about a worldwide flood, and therefore something that had to have happened essentially as described for the story to remain true (Genesis 6–9). The same instinct could extend to Jonah’s three days in the fish (Jonah 1:17) or the conquest narratives in Joshua (Joshua 6:1–27). I had learned to treat literal, factual, and true as a single package. Anything short of a literal reading felt like chipping away at what was factual, which felt like chipping away at what was true – one compromise sliding into the next. What finally pried those terms apart was realizing that the word “truth” transcended the others, that the word “factual” is just one way a story can be true, and that the word “literal” is simply the reading method typically suited to factual claims, not a requirement for truth itself. That a story about God or the world or us can still be true without being factual, and that it doesn’t need a literal reading to sustain it. Nobody hearing the parable of the prodigal son for the first time wondered whether an actual son had left with an actual inheritance, because the story was never offered as a factual report, only a true one. It said something about mercy, and resentment, and what it feels like to be the son who stayed and still couldn’t understand why grace was being handed out so freely to the one who hadn’t.¹¹⛰ Side Trail: Jesus’ parables were stories designed to make a point, not reports presented as eyewitness history. When he introduced the story of the Good Samaritan, for example, he didn’t identify an actual traveler, priest, Levite, and Samaritan whose journey could be reconstructed from historical records (Luke 10:30–37). The same is true of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32). The stories work because of what they reveal about mercy, resentment, forgiveness, and the strange generosity of God—not because their characters can be located in history. Their truth doesn’t depend on proving that the events happened exactly as narrated. The story itself is the vehicle carrying the truth. Once that distinction held, I noticed how much the rest of Scripture works this way too, true without needing to be literal or factual to earn the name.¹²⛰ Side Trail: Once that distinction settled in, I began seeing how far it could reach. Jonah, for example, can be read as a prophetic story whose theological truth does not depend on proving that a man literally survived inside a great fish for three days (Jonah 1:17–2:10). Job can be read as wisdom literature wrestling with suffering rather than a historical transcript of conversations between God and Satan (Job 1–2; 38–42). The creation accounts can be read as ancient theological narratives without requiring them to function as modern scientific descriptions of exactly how the universe came into being (Genesis 1–2). These readings remain controversial in many Christian communities, but they helped me see that asking whether a story is true and asking whether it is literally factual are not always the same question. Pulling those terms apart is what let the metaphorical reading in.

But the pulling apart of those terms is also what let a fear in behind it, one I’d carried long before I had words for it. For if a passage doesn’t need to be literal or factual to be true, what’s stopping someone (including me) from deciding it means whatever they’d like it to mean? What keeps this from turning into a free-for-all where everyone just finds the Bible saying whatever they already wanted it to say? I still take that fear seriously, maybe more seriously now than when literalism was doing all the guarding for me, because back then I never actually had to ask what was holding the meaning in place to begin with. Letting go of the chain between truth and fact doesn’t mean letting go of everything else a text carries with it. A parable still has a voice of its own, a context it was born into, a reason someone first told it that has nothing to do with what I’d prefer to hear. The images that echo across the rest of Scripture, the specific words an author chose and didn’t choose, the questions a passage seems to be wrestling with on its own, all of it pushes back against me and asks me to listen long before I get the chance to make the text say whatever I want it to.¹³⛰ Side Trail: The fear of turning interpretation into a free-for-all is legitimate, which is why scholars pay close attention to what a text actually does rather than simply what a reader wants it to say. Take the Good Samaritan: reading it metaphorically doesn’t mean we can turn the Samaritan into whatever symbol we prefer. Jesus tells the story in response to a specific question about the command to love one’s neighbor (Luke 10:25–29), and the shocking choice of a Samaritan makes sense within the Jewish-Samaritan tensions of the period. Or consider Jonah: whatever one concludes about its historicity, the story’s repeated emphasis on Nineveh, Israel’s enemies, and God’s compassion places limits on what it can plausibly mean (Jonah 1–4). Historical setting, literary form, vocabulary, narrative structure, and the text’s own recurring themes all constrain interpretation. Meaning isn’t created by the reader alone; it is negotiated with a text that can resist us.

That kind of listening, the kind that expects to be confronted and not just confirmed, is what eventually carried me somewhere neither the historical nor the metaphorical paths could take me on their own: reading the Bible sacramentally.¹⁴⛰ Side Trail: In Christian theology, a sacrament is a tangible, embodied means through which divine grace is communicated. Something ordinary that becomes a vehicle for encountering God. Baptism uses water; Communion uses bread and wine. A sacramental reading approaches Scripture in a similar spirit: the text is not God itself, nor does every word function as a direct message from God to the individual reader. Rather, Scripture can become a means through which God speaks, convicts, comforts, reveals, and transforms. The question shifts from simply “What does this text mean?” toward “What might God be doing through this text in me?” I know, it sounds stuffy, like a word that shows up right before someone hands you a robe and a candle. But what I actually mean is simple: I stopped treating the text like a subject to master and started treating it like a place where God might actually meet me. Not something I study and set back on the shelf until I need it again, but somewhere I show up and find I’m not alone. Of the three, this is the one I’ve found the most challenging, and also the one that’s given me the most back for the trouble. For years I came looking to be informed more than formed, hungrier for what I could carry off with me than for what the text might ask of me while I was still standing there. I wanted principles I could fold up small enough to fit in my pocket. But at some point the words on the page stopped being only words, not so different from how bread and wine become more than bread and wine in certain kinds of moments, not because the elements themselves change but because something happens between the ordinary object and the person kneeling in front of it. I wasn’t just reading about God anymore, I was meeting God in the pages.

But that meeting was never with a stranger. The God I find there always carries the face of the God I’ve come to know in Jesus, and it’s that face, more than anything else, that’s changed how I read the Bible. Because once I know whose face I’m meeting on the page, I find myself wanting to see the way he saw, and that changes the questions I bring to it. I used to ask what a command required of me, as if obedience meant landing exactly where the words landed and going no further. Now I ask where those words were heading in the first place, the way Jesus did of commandments he’d inherited, reading past the letter toward whatever love was reaching for underneath it.¹⁵⛰ Side Trail: Jesus repeatedly interpreted Israel’s Scriptures by looking beneath the surface of a command toward the purpose it was meant to serve. When asked about the greatest commandment, he brought together Deuteronomy 6:4–5 and Leviticus 19:18, making love of God and neighbor the interpretive center of the law (Matthew 22:34–40). He also challenged a narrow reading of purity and religious obligation by welcoming those considered unclean or socially marginal, repeatedly emphasizing mercy over exclusion (Mark 1:40–45; Luke 7:36–50). In the Sermon on the Mount, he deepens commands concerning murder, adultery, retaliation, and enemies by pressing beyond external compliance toward the condition of the heart (Matthew 5:21–48). His approach suggests that faithful interpretation is not merely about reproducing the letter of a command, but discerning the love and human flourishing toward which the command was ultimately directed. A law about gleaning turns, in his hands, into a question about who’s going hungry at the edge of the field.¹⁶⛰ Side Trail: The laws concerning gleaning were given to ensure that the vulnerable were not excluded from Israel’s economic life. Landowners were commanded not to harvest every edge of their fields or gather every remaining grape, but to leave portions for the poor, the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow (Leviticus 19:9–10; 23:22; Deuteronomy 24:19–22). The practice appears in Ruth, where Ruth (a Moabite widow) gleans in Boaz’s field and receives extraordinary generosity (Ruth 2:1–23). Jesus never directly cites these gleaning laws in the Gospels, but his broader teaching repeatedly moves toward the same underlying concern: who is being overlooked, who is vulnerable, and whether our faithfulness actually produces mercy toward them (Matthew 23:23; Luke 10:25–37). A rule about the Sabbath turns into a question about who it was ever actually meant to serve.¹⁷⛰ Side Trail: The Sabbath command appears straightforward: Israel was to cease from work on the seventh day (Exodus 20:8–11; Deuteronomy 5:12–15). But even within the Hebrew Bible, its purpose is connected to human rest, including the rest of servants, foreigners, and animals (Exodus 23:12). Jesus later pushes this question to the forefront when his disciples are criticized for plucking grain on the Sabbath. His response is striking: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In another dispute, he asks whether doing good or saving a life on the Sabbath is lawful (Mark 3:1–6). The command remains, but Jesus redirects attention toward the human good it was meant to protect. I’ve started watching for the direction a passage leans rather than only the fence it draws around itself, because that’s how Jesus read his own Scriptures, honoring the letter enough to take it seriously while outgrowing it enough to keep pointing past it.¹⁸⛰ Side Trail: Jesus often treated Scripture as something whose deepest intent could not be reduced to the boundary of a rule. He affirmed the importance of the law while repeatedly drawing attention to where it was ultimately pointing. He summarized the Law and the Prophets through love of God and neighbor (Matthew 22:37–40). He criticized religious leaders who meticulously observed minor requirements while neglecting “justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23). And when asked about divorce, he acknowledged Moses’ command while pointing behind it to the deeper intention of creation and human relationship (Matthew 19:3–8). In each case, Jesus takes the text seriously enough to engage it, but reads it dynamically enough to ask what kind of life it was ultimately trying to form. Verses that once sounded like ceilings now sound more like floors, places to start rather than places to stop, and I find myself caring less about where a text ends than about where it was always headed.¹⁹⛰ Side Trail: The idea becomes more provocative when we ask whether the trajectory of Scripture might sometimes carry us beyond boundaries the biblical writers themselves assumed. The Bible never explicitly condemns slavery as an institution, and some passages regulate it rather than abolish it (Leviticus 25:39–46; Ephesians 6:5–9; Philemon 8–16). Yet many Christians eventually concluded that the deeper movement toward human dignity and neighbor-love made slavery itself incompatible with the Gospel. The same question arises around women: texts such as 1 Timothy 2:11–12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 have been used to restrict women’s teaching and leadership, while other New Testament passages depict women exercising significant authority and ministry (Romans 16:1–7; Acts 18:24–26). Following the trajectory means asking whether faithfulness sometimes requires us to carry Scripture’s deepest impulses further than its original boundaries. That meaning doesn’t just sit still on a page waiting to be dug out. Sometimes it’s already moving, and reading well means learning to move with it, toward mercy and toward grace.

All that said, I don’t want to pretend I’ve got this all figured out. I can’t always tell where history ends and metaphor begins, or how much of a story I’ve always loved actually happened versus how much is later reflection by people who needed it to mean something. And even when I sense God meeting me in a passage, I can’t always tell whether I’m hearing God or just hearing myself, dressed up and echoed back. There’s no formula that sorts this out cleanly, no test I can run that tells me for certain which is which. I used to think that not knowing meant something was wrong with me, or with my reading, or maybe with God for not being clearer. What’s changed isn’t the not knowing. It’s what I do with it. I’ve stopped treating that uncertainty as a threat to be managed before I’m allowed to trust the text, and started trusting God with the parts I can’t sort out. Less needing to solve the mystery, more learning to live inside it.

And it’s inside that mystery that these three paths have taken shape for me, not as a system I’ve mastered but as a way of walking I’m still learning. Next time, I want to start further down each of them, beginning with what it looks like to read the Bible historically, asking what it meant to the people who first heard it, before I ask what it means for me.

Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.