I’ve been surveying the ways in which my approach to the Bible has shifted, and offered a glimpse last time of what that shift looks like in practice – something I hope to spend a significant portion of this series doing in more detail down the road. But before doing so, I want to slow down a bit and retrace some of my steps. Because explaining what changed is only part of the story. The more interesting part is how and why that change ever took shape in the first place. It didn’t arrive overnight, but came gradually, formed by a handful of small influences that slowly accumulated year after year. And so, in this post, I want to step back and sketch an outline of how that change unfolded, tracing some of its contours before returning to unpack them more fully in the posts ahead. It may feel like a slower, perhaps more long-winded stretch of the journey, but one I don’t think can be rushed without losing something important.

The earliest stirrings came, perhaps unsurprisingly by now, from the text itself. Nothing dramatic – just small, persistent patterns I wasn’t quite sure how to name. A difference in chronology between Gospel accounts;¹⛰ Side Trail: One Gospel would place an event in a different order than another, like the timing of the temple cleansing (Mark 11:15–19; John 2:13–22) or the day of Jesus’ final meal (Mark 14:12; John 19:14). At first, I barely noticed. Then I noticed often. These weren’t contradictions shouting for attention, just quiet patterns that didn’t line up as neatly as I expected. I didn’t yet have language for them, but they planted a question: why did these stories feel so carefully told – and yet so differently arranged? a story told twice, yet carrying slightly different theological weight;²⛰ Side Trail: The feeding of the crowd, for example, is told in all four Gospels (Mark 6:30–44; Matthew 14:13–21; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:1–15), yet John frames it as a sign that leads into Jesus’ “bread of life” discourse (John 6:35), giving it a deeper symbolic weight. The temple cleansing likewise functions differently depending on where it’s placed – either as a final act of confrontation (Mark 11:15–19) or as an opening declaration of identity (John 2:13–22). The repetition wasn’t redundant; it suggested purposeful retelling, with meaning shaped by context and placement. a passage that worked beautifully as proclamation but resisted tidy historical reconstruction,³⛰ Side Trail: The temptation of Jesus shows how a passage can proclaim meaning without functioning like a modern historical report. Matthew and Luke describe Jesus alone in the wilderness, engaged in detailed dialogue with the devil (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13), yet there are no witnesses, and even the order of the temptations differs. What remains consistent is the theology. Each temptation echoes Israel’s wilderness testing, and each response comes from Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 6–8), portraying Jesus as faithful where Israel failed. The story’s power lies less in reconstructing events and more in revealing Jesus’ identity at the outset of his ministry. and so on. These felt more intriguing than threatening, and because I encountered them mostly within the context of apologetics, I learned to treat them as problems to solve rather than features to explore.⁴⛰ Side Trail: At the time, I mostly encountered these tensions within the world of apologetics – the practice of defending the faith against real or perceived challenges. In that setting, questions weren’t invitations to curiosity so much as obstacles to be cleared. Differences between passages were framed as objections, raised by skeptics and answered by carefully prepared explanations. The aim was reassurance: to show that Scripture could withstand scrutiny if read the right way. Without realizing it, I learned to approach the Bible defensively. Interesting details became problems to solve, not textures to notice. Apologetics trained me to resolve tension quickly, rather than to ask what those tensions might be saying in the first place. I could typically jury-rig a solution, but often through what felt like the kind of ingenuity that would’ve made even MacGyver proud. After all, Scripture was perfectly coherent and trustworthy, so any hint of tension had to be fixable with the right tools. At first, that assumption felt reasonable, even comforting. But over time, the sheer accumulation of these small tensions slowly began to register. Not in the form of a crisis, but more as a dawning awareness that the text itself was more complex than I had once assumed or been taught to expect.

What followed wasn’t so much an unraveling as an awakening. Slowly, I became aware that I wasn’t simply reading the Bible straightforwardly but through a framework or lens that had long been guiding the way I approached every passage. Yet I had never questioned this lens simply because I wasn’t even aware that it existed. It felt natural, the way “faithful Christians” read Scripture. Like a fish unaware of the water it swims in, the lens was everywhere and nowhere at once. But as I kept noticing small details that didn’t fit tidily into the patterns I expected, I began to see its outlines: how it shaped not only what I noticed, but what I was willing to consider; how it gave additional weight to certain interpretations over others; and how it carried assumptions I had absorbed long before I ever knew to name them. Yet, this awakening didn’t feel like suspicion or betrayal – it felt like clarity. Less like hitting a wall and more like catching my reflection in a window I’d been looking through my whole life. Or, to switch metaphors, like stepping back far enough from a painting to finally see the frame around it for the first time. The frame wasn’t the enemy – it had held my faith for years – but I was finally beginning to understand that it was, in fact, a frame. And recognizing that reality finally gave me the space to begin distinguishing between my approach to Scripture and Scripture itself.

This naturally raised another question: why had I adopted my way of approaching Scripture in the first place? That curiosity first carried me back to the reasons that once anchored it. Whether rooted in arguments about the Bible’s unity,⁵⛰ Side Trail: I had been taught – carefully and convincingly – that the Bible’s greatest strength was its unity. Despite being written over centuries, by many authors, in different genres, it was presented as telling one coherent story with one voice. That claim did real work for me. It explained why the Bible could be trusted, why its parts belonged together, and why tensions needed to be resolved rather than explored. Arguments for unity didn’t just support my reading of Scripture; they quietly set the rules for how Scripture was allowed to speak in the first place. its fulfilled prophecies,⁶⛰ Side Trail: I had learned to see fulfilled prophecies as a proof that the Bible wasn’t just coherent, but divinely orchestrated. What God spoke through the prophets, God later brought to completion in precise detail. Verses from Isaiah, Micah, the Psalms, and Zechariah were read as predictions waiting patiently for Jesus to arrive (Isaiah 7:14; Micah 5:2; Psalm 22; Zechariah 11:12–13). This gave the story momentum and certainty. History itself seemed to confirm Scripture’s claims. Fulfilled prophecy didn’t just reinforce unity; it turned the Bible into a kind of divine forecast, where meaning flowed forward in straight lines and doubt had little room to linger. or its own claim to divine inspiration,⁷⛰ Side Trail: I was taught that Scripture didn’t merely contain human reflections about God, but originated in God himself. God stood behind every word, guiding authors so that what they wrote was exactly what God intended to say (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20–21). That conviction carried enormous weight. If God was the ultimate author, then Scripture had to be internally consistent, historically reliable, and free from real tension. Any apparent problems had to be solvable, because God doesn’t contradict himself. Divine inspiration wasn’t just a belief about where the Bible came from; it quietly dictated how it had to behave – and shaped my reading long before I ever realized it. these reasons presented Scripture as a text uniquely given by God – and therefore as one that demanded a very particular kind of reading.⁸⛰ Side Trail: Taken together, these reasons framed Scripture as a book unlike any other – uniquely given by God, standing above all ordinary texts. Because of that, it wasn’t just read; it was handled with a special set of expectations. It had to speak with one voice, tell one story, and resolve its own tensions without remainder. Reading became an act of defense as much as devotion. Certain questions felt off-limits, and certain conclusions were already fixed in place. The belief that the Bible came directly from God didn’t simply shape my confidence in it; it prescribed a very particular way of approaching it – one where coherence was assumed in advance and alternative readings felt not just wrong, but unsafe. Reasons that weren’t naïve or simplistic, but shaped by thoughtful, sincere thinkers who cared deeply about truth and sought to honor Scripture itself. And for years, those reasons gave me real stability. But revisiting those reasons with a deeper sense of honesty and a more careful sense of patience subtly changed how they landed. I began to question how persuasive they truly were by uncovering the assumptions beneath them, and asking why those assumptions had once felt so solid. And, gradually, I also began to see how closely they were bound up, not simply with a humble pursuit of truth, but with a deep desire to preserve a certain set of beliefs – beliefs I could bet my life on, and a way of seeing the Bible that guaranteed them. I wasn’t deconstructing so much as reorienting, embarking on a quest to understand not just the lenses I had inherited, but the reasons behind them and the deeper hopes they were meant to hold together.

That quest eventually sent me further back, into the storied past that shaped the creation of those lenses themselves. For most of my life, I simply assumed that Christians had always read the Bible the same way I had. But when I began studying different periods of the church’s life, I discovered that the approaches I had once considered timeless were actually fairly recent, born out of particular cultural concerns, philosophical developments, and theological battles. As I traced influences like the Reformation and its quest for authority and clarity,⁹⛰ Side Trail: Faced with competing claims of authority – from popes, councils, and traditions – the Reformers leaned hard into Scripture as the final court of appeal. For Scripture to function that way, it needed to be clear, stable, and internally coherent. Ambiguity became a liability. Tension felt dangerous. So readings that emphasized clarity, unity, and plain meaning weren’t just theological preferences; they were necessities in a battle over who or what had the right to speak with authority. What I had received as a timeless posture toward the Bible turned out to be a historically conditioned response to a crisis of authority, one that quietly trained generations of readers, including me, to equate faithfulness with certainty. or the Enlightenment and its hunger for certainty and control,¹⁰⛰ Side Trail: As confidence in reason, method, and universal laws grew, truth increasingly came to be defined as something that could be systematized, verified, and defended. Scripture was pulled into that project. It was expected to function like a stable set of propositions – clear, consistent, and immune to contradiction. Reading the Bible this way didn’t just promise faith; it promised security. What I had absorbed as “strong” readings of Scripture were often shaped by this deeper desire for intellectual control, where certainty mattered as much as devotion. or the modern world and its discomfort with fragmentation and ambiguity,¹¹⛰ Side Trail: We live in a culture that prizes coherence, efficiency, and clean systems – where loose ends feel like problems to be fixed rather than realities to be lived with. That instinct carried over into how I read the Bible. Differences between texts felt threatening, not generative. Tension signaled failure instead of depth. I had learned, almost without noticing, to expect Scripture to function like a well-organized manual rather than a collection of voices formed across centuries. In that light, my unease wasn’t really about the Bible at all; it was about my own resistance to complexity and my desire for everything to resolve neatly and quickly. I began to realize that the framework guiding my reading wasn’t simply “biblical” – it had a history. It grew out of real concerns, real debates, and real attempts to defend faith in a changing world. Yet that realization didn’t make the framework less valuable. If anything, it made it more relatable, more human. Most of all, however, it freed me from the idea that the lens I had inherited was the only faithful one. Rather, it was part of a much larger conversation, one that extended far beyond my own tradition and into the long, varied ways Christians have engaged Scripture across the centuries.

But it didn’t stop there. Because learning the history of where my framework had come from also opened my eyes to the extent to which it had shaped the culture and institutions that formed me. It was woven into the sermons I heard,¹²⛰ Side Trail: Week after week, sermons assumed a certain kind of Bible before any passage was opened. Stories were arranged into clear moral lessons, apparent tensions were quietly resolved, and different texts were woven into a single, seamless point. A verse from Proverbs might be paired with a promise from Paul and a saying of Jesus, all treated as if they spoke with one voice and one intent. Difficult questions were preempted with familiar explanations, not because the preacher was careless, but because the framework had already decided what Scripture must be like. The pulpit reinforced that vision, training me to expect coherence first and to read complexity as a problem to be solved rather than something to be explored. the study Bibles and commentaries I referenced,¹³⛰ Side Trail: The notes beneath the text often worked quietly, smoothing over differences before I had time to wrestle with them myself. If two passages didn’t line up, an explanation was already waiting – one author was summarizing, another expanding, a timeline had been compressed, a detail assumed rather than stated. Margins guided my eyes away from tension and toward resolution. Again, this wasn’t careless or malicious; it was simply how the framework operated. Those resources trained me to treat Scripture’s rough edges as puzzles with predetermined solutions, rather than as invitations to listen more carefully to each text on its own terms. the worship songs that were played at church or on the radio,¹⁴⛰ Side Trail: Lyrics often assumed a single, seamless biblical story, collapsing lament, doubt, judgment, and protest into confident declarations of certainty. Verses from different parts of Scripture were blended together as if they all spoke in the same key, reinforcing ideas of clarity, consistency, and resolution. Songs rarely lingered with tension or unanswered questions; they moved quickly toward affirmation and assurance. Over time, that musical diet trained my instincts as much as any sermon or study note, shaping how I expected Scripture – and faith itself – to sound: confident, settled, and untroubled by complexity. the youth group lessons and small group conversations that guided my questions,¹⁵⛰ Side Trail: Discussions were usually framed around clear takeaways: What does this passage teach us? How do we apply it? Any tension in the text was quickly redirected toward a lesson or principle. If someone raised a difficult question – about history, contradictions, or ethics – it was often met with a reassuring answer that closed the issue rather than opening it up. Over time, I learned which questions led to approval and which quietly stalled the conversation. Those spaces didn’t just pass on information; they trained my instincts, guiding me toward certainty and away from lingering, unresolved curiosity.
even the popular Christian books, movies, and television shows I had grown up with.¹⁶⛰ Side Trail: Novels like those in the Left Behind series presented the Bible as a precise end-times script, complete with timelines and certainty about how history would unfold. Shows like VeggieTales distilled Scripture into clear moral lessons, smoothing away ambiguity for the sake of simplicity. Films like The Passion of the Christ brought the Gospels to life with visceral power, but did so by blending the four accounts into a single, harmonized sequence. More recently, projects like The Chosen aim to humanize the Gospels, yet still rely on merged backstories to create narrative continuity. None of this was meant to mislead, but together it trained me to expect one voice, one storyline – valuing coherence over complexity long before I knew I was doing it. In other words, it wasn’t just a set of interpretive assumptions – it was an entire ecosystem, a whole world that made a certain way of reading the Bible feel not only natural but inevitable. Long before I ever encountered formal teaching about how Scripture should be approached or understood, my expectations had already been trained. I knew what the Bible was supposed to sound like, how it was supposed to behave, and what kinds of questions were safe to ask. Once I grasped how completely that atmosphere had shaped me, it finally made sense why the idea of exploring other ways of approaching Scripture felt so unsettling. I wouldn’t just be rethinking interpretations – I’d be stepping outside the only interpretive world I’d ever known.

And yet, despite the comfort that world offered, the clarity of these realizations eventually gave me the courage to finally step outside of it. Not because I could no longer make sense of it – I could, and still can – but because doing so started to feel increasingly forced, less like a posture growing organically out of Scripture and more like an artificial grid I was pressing onto it. And once I understood that my way of reading Scripture wasn’t the only faithful option, or the only one Christians had ever practiced, the fear surrounding other perspectives slowly began to loosen its grip. I didn’t rush toward these perspectives, nor did I accept them uncritically. But I no longer felt compelled to dismiss them simply because they didn’t start from the same assumptions I had once been given. And that’s when things really began to change. Because as I listened, I began to notice how often these perspectives named things I had already sensed but never quite known how to say out loud. How they allowed the Bible’s differences to remain visible rather than forcing them to disappear, and how they took the text’s humanity seriously without treating it as something to be tamed. They didn’t flatten Scripture or drain it of meaning; they widened it, deepened it, and gave it room to breathe.

Still, even as my understanding widened, the emotional pull of the world I came from remained strong – and in many ways, still does. Its frameworks had given me stability. It shaped my earliest encounters with God and anchored some of my most meaningful spiritual memories. It connected me to family, friends, and spiritual mentors I loved and respected deeply. Stepping too far from it didn’t feel like some theoretical curiosity; it felt like risking my own sense of belonging. Much of my resistance to this change wasn’t intellectual. It was relational. I wasn’t afraid of disagreement so much as disconnection – of losing a common language and a shared way of seeing the world, of no longer knowing where I fit, and of drifting beyond the edges of a community that once felt like home. I didn’t want to fracture trust or loosen the bonds that had carried me for so long, nor did I want to disappoint people or become someone others silently worried about or perceived as a threat. More than anything, I didn’t want to compromise my relationship with God. So I moved slowly and cautiously, often feeling caught between competing loyalties – trying to hold integrity in one hand and faithfulness in the other, even when they sometimes seemed to pull in different directions. An inner tug-of-war that hasn’t entirely gone away, but one I’m slowly learning to navigate with a bit more honesty and grace.

All of this to say: the shift in my approach to the Bible didn’t happen because of a single argument or contradiction, nor was it a neat sequence of events or a clean intellectual progression. It emerged from the slow convergence of many forces – noticing tensions in the text, becoming aware of the lenses that shaped how I read it, revisiting the reasons behind those lenses, tracing their history, recognizing how deeply they shaped my world, opening myself to other ways of reading Scripture, and wrestling with the existential pull beneath it all. Each applied pressure in its own way, and over time that pressure gently reshaped how I read. None of them stood alone, and none were sufficient by themselves. But together, they formed a persistent invitation to see Scripture with fresh eyes – not out of rebellion or cynicism, but out of a deeper longing for honesty. It wasn’t a rejection of my past so much as an extension of the very faithfulness it had taught me: to love God not only with all of my heart and all of my soul, but with all of my mind.

Next time, and with that broad outline now in place, I want to begin unpacking each of these contours more fully, starting with the subtle tensions in the text and the unseen lenses that had long shaped how I handled them.

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