If you read the last post, you know I ended it with something of a confession. Stepping into critical scholarship felt less like an intellectual exercise and more like quietly opening a door I’d been warned my whole life to keep shut. And so that’s where I want to pick up in this post, to give a bit more insight into how much weight those warnings carried for me. Because they weren’t just ideas I held. They were instincts I had absorbed, woven so deeply into how I approached Scripture that I didn’t even recognize them as assumptions. They felt like wisdom. They felt like faithfulness. And honestly? For a long time, they felt like me. So before I tell you what I found on the other side of that door, I think it’s worth naming the warnings themselves, one by one. Where they came from. Why they stuck. And what it actually felt like to watch them slowly lose their grip. Like hiking a trail plastered with warning signs about dangerous terrain ahead, the path does narrow and the footing does get less sure – but I’ve found the landscape beyond to be so unexpectedly rich and alive that the warnings, however well-intentioned, never quite told the whole story.

The most well-worn warning was one I had absorbed so completely I could recite it without thinking: critical scholars begin by ruling out the supernatural. They’ve already decided, before they open a single page, that miracles don’t happen, prophecy is written in hindsight, and God is basically a literary device someone invented in the Ancient Near East.¹⛰ Side Trail: “Critical scholarship” had become a kind of blanket term in a lot of the circles I grew up in, and it carried an assumed meaning that wasn’t always accurate. Plenty of critical scholars actually held a range of views on the supernatural, but that nuance hadn’t really made it into everyday conversation. By the time the idea filtered down through churches and homes, the categories had gotten a little blurry. Critical meant secular, secular meant no miracles, no miracles meant you should probably be careful. It was well-meaning, genuinely so. But it meant a lot of people like me learned to distrust an entire conversation without ever quite getting to sit down and have it. I had heard this so many times it functioned less like an argument and more like background music, always playing but never questioned. So whenever I noticed differences in the Gospels or tensions in Israel’s laws, I assumed scholarly explanations were motivated by disbelief rather than genuine curiosity.²⛰ Side Trail: Genuine questions like why Mark 1:12 has Jesus driven into the wilderness immediately after his baptism in Mark 1:9-11 while Luke places a full genealogy in Luke 3:23-38 between the baptism and the wilderness, or why Exodus 20:11 grounds the Sabbath in God resting at creation while Deut. 5:15 grounds it in the Exodus from Egypt, those got filed away in my mind under “that’s just what skeptics ask.” It was a way of protecting something precious, and I understand the instinct. But it had a cost. It made curiosity feel a little dangerous to me. And once curiosity feels dangerous, you stop asking questions not because you’ve found answers but because you’ve learned not to notice the questions in the first place. It was a tidy story, and it kept me from reading their actual work for years. When I finally did, I felt more than a little sheepish, the theological equivalent of avoiding a restaurant for a decade because someone told you the food was terrible, then finally trying it and ordering seconds. Because these scholars weren’t trying to drain the text of God. They were paying careful, reverent attention to the human side of how Scripture formed, with a kind of care I recognized immediately as something close to love.³⛰ Side Trail: I had expected coldness and the detached, clinical air of someone performing an autopsy. What I found instead was something different. Raymond Brown, a Catholic priest who spent decades studying the infancy and passion narratives, wrote with the patience of someone who believed every detail deserved careful handling. Marcus Borg, who was quite open about his own complicated faith, still approached the Gospels with a warmth that was hard to mistake for hostility. And N.T. Wright, working through the resurrection narratives in his massive study, wrote like a man who found the material genuinely astonishing. None of them matched the portrait I had been handed. I had been given a caricature, and the real thing caught me off guard. That didn’t flatten the miraculous for me so much as it contextualized it. The warning dissolved not because I argued it away, but because the work itself simply didn’t match the description I’d been given.

As that warning loosened its grip, another one stepped forward to take its place. This one was more philosophically dressed, and perhaps more subtle for it. The idea was that analyzing authorship, tracing sources, or noticing editorial shaping meant you’d stopped submitting to Scripture and started sitting in judgment over it, appointing yourself as its editor-in-chief, red pen in hand, deciding what counts and what doesn’t. I heard this so often it started to feel like obvious truth. Then I started paying closer attention to what my old framework was actually doing, and I noticed something I genuinely couldn’t unsee: every approach to Scripture involves human judgment, without exception. Deciding a passage is literal rather than symbolic? Judgment. Harmonizing two apparently contradictory accounts? Judgment. Choosing which laws still apply, which promises are universal, which cultural context changes everything? All of it judgment, all the way down.⁴⛰ Side Trail: I remember when this landed for me. I had grown up watching people harmonize the different resurrection accounts – Mary alone at the tomb in John 20:1, multiple women in Mark 16:1, the angel inside in Luke 24:3-4, two angels in John 20:12 – into one seamless sequence, moving figures around like chess pieces until everything fit. It never occurred to me that this was a judgment call. It felt like faithfulness. But so was deciding that the six days of Gen. 1:1-31 were literal (or not), or that when Jesus said “this is my body” in Luke 22:19 he meant it symbolically (or not), or that the thousand years in Rev. 20:4 were literal (or not), or that Paul’s instruction for women to stay silent in 1 Cor. 14:34 was culturally conditioned but his words about the resurrection in 1 Cor. 15:20-22 were binding for all time (or not). Every one of those was a choice. The red pen was always in someone’s hand. The only question was whether they knew they were holding it. My old framework was saturated with interpretation at every level. It had simply learned to call itself obedience, which made it extraordinarily difficult to question, because questioning it felt like questioning God rather than questioning a method. Once I saw that clearly, the warning lost most of its weight.

Not far behind was a warning that caught me off guard precisely because it didn’t announce itself as a warning at all. It just felt like common sense. The idea was simple: the Bible means what it says, and anyone who has truly surrendered to it won’t need to go digging around in ancient sources or debating who wrote what and when. Just read it, trust it, and apply it.⁵⛰ Side Trail: This idea has its own history, which is a little ironic given what it’s asking you not to do. It grew out of a deeply sincere movement, the Reformation instinct that ordinary people should be able to read Scripture for themselves, without a priest or institution standing between them and the text. That was a beautiful idea. But somewhere along the way it quietly shifted into something slightly different: not just that anyone could read Scripture, but that reading it plainly was the same as reading it correctly, and that extra-biblical knowledge was at best unnecessary and at worst a sign you didn’t quite trust God enough. The assumption felt humble. It presented itself as simple faith. But it carried a hidden confidence: that my plain reading, shaped by my language, my culture, my century, and my tradition, was somehow the natural one. There’s something appealing about that posture, and I don’t want to mock it, because I held it sincerely for a long time. But the more I actually read the Bible, the more I realized that “just read it” is doing an enormous amount of unexamined work. Which translation? Through which tradition? With which assumptions about genre, history, and context already in place? The person who says they simply read the Bible without any interpretive framework is a little like someone who says they simply see without using their eyes. The framework is always there. The only question is whether you’re aware of it. And becoming aware of mine, rather than weakening my relationship with Scripture, turned out to be one of the most surprising and liberating things that ever happened to it.

Then there was the warning I encountered less in sermons and more in well-meaning conversations, usually from someone who genuinely cared about me. It went something like this: be careful how much you let your intellect lead, because faith is ultimately a matter of the heart, not the head.⁶⛰ Side Trail: What made this one so hard to push back on was how many places it showed up. It was in the worship song that celebrated surrendering your questions at the altar. It was in the small group leader who gently suggested that too much reading could get in the way of just listening to God. It was in the bestselling devotional that opened with a caution against letting theology crowd out relationship. It was in the professor, who warned students that you could know all the facts and still miss the whole point. None of it was mean-spirited. All of it came from somewhere real. But together it added up to a quiet pressure, a gravitational pull away from certain kinds of questions before you’d even had a chance to ask them. And I understood the spirit of it. I really did. There is a kind of cold, detached intellectualism that can hollow faith out from the inside, replacing wonder with analysis and worship with footnotes. I’ve met that version of scholarship, and it isn’t pretty.⁷⛰ Side Trail: You can find it in figures like Bart Ehrman, who has built a considerable following on the idea that what scholars know about the Bible would shock most ordinary believers. There’s real scholarship in his work (and I can appreciate much of it), but there’s also a tone that can sometimes feel less like inquiry and more like debunking for its own sake. Or in the Jesus Seminar, where scholars voted with colored beads on which words Jesus actually said, a process that felt less like scholarship and more like an audit. Or the sharper corners of the internet where contempt for Christianity is worn like a badge of sophistication. The warning wasn’t invented from nothing. It just got applied too broadly, until any careful question felt like the first step toward losing everything. But the conclusion being drawn, that curiosity itself is spiritually suspect, that asking hard questions means you’re trusting your brain more than your Bible, never quite sat right with me. Because the same Jesus who said “love God with all your heart” also said “with all your mind.”⁸⛰ Side Trail: The full line is Matt. 22:37 where Jesus is quoting Deut. 6:5, the central confession of Jewish faith, the verse every observant Jew recited morning and evening. He doesn’t soften it or reorder it. Heart, soul, and mind, all of it directed toward God. The early church took this seriously. Justin Martyr, Origen, and Augustine were not men who treated thinking as a spiritual liability. Augustine’s Confessions is thirteen books of restless, searching inquiry. The idea that faith and intellectual curiosity are natural enemies is surprisingly recent, and surprisingly thin when you press on it. The same tradition that gave us devotional psalms also gave us Job, Ecclesiastes, and a God who apparently has no objection to being argued with at length.⁹⛰ Side Trail: Abraham argued with God over Sodom in Gen. 18:23-32, pressing him repeatedly “what if there are forty-five… forty… thirty” until God agreed to spare the city for ten righteous people. Jacob physically wrestled with God through the night in Gen. 32:24-28 and walked away with a limp and a blessing. The Psalms are full of lament and accusation and Psalm 88:18 ends with no resolution at all, just the single word “darkness.” Job spends thirty-five chapters demanding answers and God never quite gives them, but in Job 42:7 still calls Job’s honest wrestling more pleasing than his friends’ tidy, deferential theology. The tradition has always had more room for hard questions than the warning suggested. Intellectual honesty and spiritual depth have never been as opposed as that warning suggested.¹⁰⛰ Side Trail: Blaise Pascal was one of the greatest mathematicians of the seventeenth century and wrote the Pensées, one of the most searching defenses of Christian faith ever produced. John Polkinghorne resigned his chair as Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge to become an Anglican priest, spending the rest of his career arguing that science and faith were asking the same questions from different angles. Alvin Plantinga spent fifty years as one of America’s most rigorous analytic philosophers while remaining a committed Calvinist. The caricature of the intellectual who inevitably loses faith, or the believer who survives only by avoiding hard questions, has never matched the actual historical record particularly well. If anything, the most spiritually alive people I’ve encountered tend to be the ones who never stopped asking questions. The heart and the head, it turns out, were always meant to make the journey together.

Alongside the intellectual warnings ran a parallel track of social ones, and honestly, these were often harder to shake. In many of the circles I belonged to, critical scholarship wasn’t just intellectually suspect, it was socially coded. To show too much curiosity about it was to signal something about yourself, and what it signaled wasn’t good. It suggested you were drifting, or that you’d been spending too much time on the internet, or that you were on the slow road to becoming the kind of person who ruins a perfectly good Bible study by asking whether Moses actually wrote Deuteronomy.¹¹⛰ Side Trail: The Moses question is actually a good example of how these things work. Deut. 34:5-6 describes Moses’ own death and burial in the third person, which even many traditional scholars acknowledge is a little hard to explain if Moses wrote the whole thing. The Jewish Talmud raises the question itself, with some suggesting Joshua wrote the final verses, while others attributed them to Moses writing prophetically. This isn’t a skeptic’s invention. It’s a question the tradition has sat with for centuries. But in a lot of contemporary conservative circles it had become a kind of litmus test, a signal of where your loyalties lay, which made it almost impossible to ask innocently. I’m only half joking. The social cost of curiosity was real, and it shaped me more than I like to admit. Even when the intellectual warnings had stopped working, the relational ones still had teeth. There is something deeply human about wanting to stay legible to the people who love you, and something genuinely costly about becoming, at least for a season, harder to place. That cost deserves to be acknowledged. Walking toward honest questions can feel, at first, like walking away from people. Sometimes, for a while, it is. But I’ve also found that the people worth keeping tend to stay curious alongside you, even when they’re not sure where you’re headed.

The next warning arrived wrapped in something that felt less like fear and more like gravity. It wasn’t emotional or social. It was historical. Two thousand years of the church have read Scripture a certain way, it reminded me. Councils deliberated. Creeds were hammered out. Theologians across centuries staked their lives on particular readings of the text. And here I was, a regular person with a decent library and a lot of questions, suggesting that maybe the picture was more complicated than all of that. Who exactly did I think I was? It’s a genuinely humbling thing to sit with, and I don’t think it should be dismissed. Tradition deserves real respect, and I still give it that. But the more I read church history itself, the more I discovered that the tradition has always been far more contested, more layered, and more self-revising than that warning let on.¹²⛰ Side Trail: The canon itself is a good example. The books we now consider settled Scripture were debated for centuries. Eusebius in the fourth century listed several New Testament books as still disputed, including Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, and Revelation. The Council of Carthage in 397 AD is often cited as settling the canon, but arguments continued well past that. Luther wanted to remove James from the New Testament entirely, calling it an “epistle of straw” because he felt it contradicted Paul on justification. The Eastern and Western churches still disagree on which Old Testament books belong. Even the creeds, which feel like bedrock, were hard won. The Council of Nicaea in 325 AD was a genuinely contested affair, with bishops on multiple sides convinced the other was leading the church into catastrophe. The tradition is real and it deserves weight. It just has never been quite as uniform as the warning suggested. The church has changed its mind before, sometimes dramatically, on questions it once considered settled.¹³⛰ Side Trail: Usury (charging interest on loans) was condemned as gravely sinful by the Third Lateran Council in 1179 and remained official church teaching for centuries. It is now practiced without comment by virtually every Christian institution on earth. For most of church history, the overwhelming consensus was that the Bible permitted and even regulated slavery. Theologians of enormous stature defended it. It took a long, painful argument to revise that reading. Galileo’s heliocentric model was condemned by the Inquisition in 1633, with Scripture cited as evidence against it. Women’s ordination, the age of the earth, the relationship between church and state, the legitimacy of charging interest, etc., the list of questions the church once considered settled and later revisited is longer and more uncomfortable than the warning ever acknowledged. The same Spirit that guided the councils, I came to believe, didn’t stop showing up after the ink dried. Tradition is a conversation, not a verdict. And joining that conversation honestly, even when it means asking uncomfortable questions, began to feel less like arrogance and more like participation in something ancient yet alive.

Underneath all of these, though, was the warning that the others had been silently borrowing their force from all along. It wasn’t intellectual or social or historical. It was spiritual, and it was personal: people who go down this road lose their faith. They become too clever. They drift into ambiguity and never find their way back. And because I truly wanted to honor God, this one didn’t stay abstract. It became a reflex, an internal alarm that went off whenever a question felt too dangerous or too far from the safe ground I’d been taught to stand on. Even when I could no longer defend the old answers, that fear kept pulling me back toward the familiar. It took real time, and real courage I don’t want to overstate, to trust God (and myself) enough to read openly. When I finally did, the warning simply fell apart, not with a bang but with a kind of gentle, almost anticlimactic deflation. Many of these scholars were people of deep faith. Not the defensive kind, but the unhurried kind that has been tested and has held. And reading them didn’t cause me to loosen my grip on God, but actually transformed it in ways I hadn’t expected and couldn’t have predicted.

All that said, I do want to be up front about one last thing before I close, because it feels important to say out loud. Namely, I don’t know exactly where this path leads. I’m not writing from the far end of a completed journey, looking back with everything neatly resolved. I’m writing from the middle of it, still moving, still surprised, still holding questions I can’t yet answer. And honestly? I’ve made a kind of peace with that. What I do know is the posture I want to keep: a genuine willingness to follow truth wherever it leads, and a simple trust that the God who nudged me toward honesty in the first place is faithful enough to meet me there. I’d rather walk openly into uncertainty with God than stand confidently still inside a framework that stopped fitting. That feels, at this point, like the most faithful way to travel.

And if that way of traveling has taught me anything so far, it’s that what waits on the other side of honest questions is far better than what I’ve left behind. So that’s what I want to talk about next. Not the warnings themselves, but the whole new world beyond them, and the strange joy of discovering what it’s like when you finally begin to explore it.

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