For most of my life, reading the Bible primarily meant trying to get something out of it. Sometimes that was doctrine, sometimes guidance, sometimes reassurance, and sometimes just a verse to prove I was right (I mean, who hasn’t?). But beneath those reasons was a deeper assumption I rarely questioned: God could speak through these words because God was ultimately the author behind them. As I explored a few posts back, I once understood inspiration to involve something called “divine superintendence,” a fancy term for the idea that God worked through the human authors to ensure that what they wrote was exactly what God wanted written.¹⛰ Side Trail: The language of divine superintendence is especially associated with Protestant accounts of inspiration. The idea is not necessarily that biblical writers heard a voice dictating sentences, or that their personalities disappeared. Rather, God is understood to have worked through their ordinary choices, circumstances, and literary styles so that the resulting writings expressed exactly what God intended. That distinction matters, because it is a more thoughtful position than the caricature of authors functioning as heavenly stenographers. My difficulty is not that the view is incoherent. It is that I no longer find its claims about God’s involvement sufficiently established by the evidence we have. And although I still regard that as a coherent and defensible approach, it’s an approach that I’ve simply found less and less compelling over time.²⛰ Side Trail: Part of what changed for me was learning to distinguish a theological claim about Scripture from a historical conclusion about how Scripture came to be. The former may be meaningful within a particular understanding of God; the latter has to contend with manuscripts, sources, literary development, competing perspectives, and the messy realities of ancient authorship. None of those observations automatically disproves divine inspiration. But neither do they independently demonstrate that God ensured every biblical word was written exactly as intended. I increasingly wanted my account of Scripture to begin with what I could actually learn about these writings, rather than with what I believed they must be. So while learning to read historically and metaphorically no doubt opened up Scripture in new ways, losing that approach to inspiration left me with a question I wasn’t prepared for: if God hadn’t ultimately authored these words, could God still speak through them? After all, I hadn’t simply believed the Bible contained important ideas about God; I’d believed that through its words, I might actually hear from God too, and that wasn’t something I was all that eager to give up.

And so it was with that question lingering in the back of my mind that I first encountered the idea of reading Scripture sacramentally. I know, I know, the word sounds a little parochial, something you’d expect to hear alongside words like liturgy or vestments (incense, anyone?). But the idea is fairly simple (also, yes to the incense, for what it’s worth). For a sacrament is simply something ordinary through which God’s presence can be encountered.³⛰ Side Trail: Of course, the word sacrament means different things in different Christian traditions. Some churches reserve it for particular rites, often baptism and Communion, while others recognize a larger number. Their explanations of how grace is communicated also differ. I’m using the term here in a broader, analogical sense: an ordinary, material thing can become an occasion for encountering divine presence. That doesn’t mean I’m claiming the Bible is a sacrament in precisely the same theological sense as the Eucharist. I’m borrowing a way of thinking about how the sacred and the ordinary might meet, without requiring the ordinary thing to cease being ordinary. And anyone who’s taken Communion probably gets the gist of it already. What exactly happens with the bread and wine is, of course, one of the most famous of theological disagreements (leave it to us Christians to turn a shared meal into centuries of divisive debate, *sigh*).⁴⛰ Side Trail: The disagreements surrounding Communion are almost a miniature history of Christian theology. Catholics speak of transubstantiation; many Lutherans affirm Christ’s real presence while rejecting that particular explanation; Reformed Christians have offered accounts of spiritual presence; and some Protestants emphasize remembrance. These positions are not interchangeable, and each has a much richer history than a sentence can capture. What interests me here is the shared instinct beneath many of them: bread and wine can matter religiously in ways that exceed their ingredients. Even where Christians disagree about what happens, they have long treated an ordinary meal as a possible meeting place with God. But whatever happens there theologically, the bread and wine originate as indisputably ordinary things. Someone baked the bread, after all, and someone made the wine. Neither had to descend from heaven in order for Christ to become present in and through them. Their ordinary origins don’t diminish their sacred significance. So why had I assumed something different about Scripture? If bread and wine can become a means of encountering God without God personally overseeing their production, then why couldn’t the same be said about Scripture too?

The more I considered that question and the analogy behind it, the more I realized how often Christians have already recognized something similar in other places too. Because whether through music, paintings, literature, etc., faithful people have described encountering God through all sorts of different mediums, and I’m no exception.⁵⛰ Side Trail: I don’t mean that every beautiful song, painting, or novel should automatically be called a revelation from God. People can be deeply moved by art for reasons that have little to do with religion, and Christians can disagree about what an experience means. Still, the possibility seems familiar enough. A melody can open us to gratitude; a painting can sharpen our attention to suffering; a story can awaken compassion we had neglected. If I believe God is present and active in the world, I don’t see why such experiences must be dismissed simply because their human causes are visible and understandable. There have been moments when a worship song has left me with a profound sense of God’s presence, even though I know a human being wrote its lyrics and composed its melody.⁶⛰ Side Trail: Worship music is an especially interesting example because its emotional effects are hardly mysterious. Repetition, melody, harmony, anticipation, memory, and the presence of other people can all shape what we feel. I once might have worried that identifying those influences somehow explained away the experience. But why should it? Knowing how music works doesn’t tell me everything about what a moment means. At the same time, powerful feelings are not reliable proof that a lyric is true or that God endorses it. Perhaps the wiser response is neither automatic skepticism nor automatic certainty, but gratitude accompanied by a little humility. And the same is true for great books. I think especially of authors like C. S. Lewis, whose imagination and ability to communicate goodness, truth, and beauty have often left me feeling as though I’d encountered something of God through his words.⁷⛰ Side Trail: Lewis is an interesting example for me precisely because I don’t agree with everything he believed. His apologetics, theology, and imaginative writing have all influenced me, though some of his arguments strike me differently now than they once did. Yet a passage from Narnia or one of his essays can still awaken a sense of longing, goodness, or wonder. I don’t need to imagine that God approved every sentence Lewis wrote to take those moments seriously. In fact, allowing a writer to be both insightful and mistaken seems like a healthier way of appreciating literature, and perhaps Scripture, than demanding perfection first. Yet nobody thinks such a song or book was secretly dictated or superintended (there’s that word again) from heaven, or that everything their creators expressed was divinely endorsed. They’re thoroughly human creations, shaped by their creators’ personalities, experiences, and imaginations. Nonetheless, they can become more than an exchange of ideas or an enjoyable aesthetic experience. Something ordinary can often become the means through which something extraordinary can be experienced.

And so it was that realization that added another layer to my growing understanding of Scripture. As I covered in the last two posts, reading historically helped me to understand what biblical authors were saying in their own worlds, and reading metaphorically helped me appreciate how their stories can communicate truth beyond their literal meaning. Yet in both cases the focus is still primarily on understanding Scripture. Reading sacramentally, on the other hand, invites something else: the possibility of experiencing God’s presence through reading, whether or not I understand anything new about the text. In a way, this isn’t entirely foreign to the world I came from, however. There, it was common to distinguish between interpretation and illumination.⁸⛰ Side Trail: Interpretation and illumination are related ideas, but they answer somewhat different questions. Interpretation asks what a passage communicates, taking account of language, genre, history, and context. Illumination, in many Protestant accounts, describes the Spirit helping a reader recognize, receive, or respond to the truth of that passage. I still find that distinction useful, even if my understanding has changed. Sacramental reading adds another possibility: the encounter itself may matter, apart from whether I have discovered a new meaning or gained a clearer insight. It isn’t a substitute for careful interpretation; it’s a reminder that reading can involve more than analysis. To speak of the Holy Spirit in helping illuminate Scripture and bring it to life; to receive its truth or recognize its relevance. Nevertheless, reading sacramentally goes beyond illumination, at least as I’ve generally understood it. For the emphasis isn’t simply on grasping what the text communicates, but on encountering God through reading itself. After all, there’s a difference between learning about someone and spending time in their presence. Just as sitting quietly beside someone I love can be meaningful without exchanging profound words, perhaps Scripture too can become meaningful beyond what I can learn from it.

I think of someone sitting beside a loved one in a hospital room, opening the Psalms because they don’t know what else to do. They’ve heard these words before and aren’t seeking a new interpretation or an explanation for suffering. But the familiar language of lament gives them a way to pray when their own words fail. Perhaps they experience unexpected peace or simply feel less alone. Yet encountering God through Scripture doesn’t always feel comforting. Sometimes it means entering more deeply into grief rather than escaping it. I think of prophets lamenting injustice,⁹⛰ Side Trail: The prophets were hardly strangers to lament. Think of Jeremiah grieving over the devastation of his people, or Amos condemning those who trample the poor while maintaining their religious celebrations. Their words don’t always offer the comfort I might prefer. Sometimes they unsettle me, drawing attention to suffering and injustice I’d rather overlook. That’s part of why I resist treating every encounter with Scripture as a search for reassurance. If these texts can help me become more attentive to the pain of others, perhaps their sacred significance sometimes lies in the discomfort they produce rather than the certainty they provide. Jesus weeping over Jerusalem,¹⁰⛰ Side Trail: Luke describes Jesus approaching Jerusalem and weeping over the city, lamenting that it did not recognize what would bring peace (Luke 19:41–44). Matthew preserves another lament in which Jesus longs to gather Jerusalem’s children as a hen gathers her chicks (Matthew 23:37). Whatever questions I might have about the historical setting or precise wording of these passages, their portrait of Jesus is striking. His response is not detached analysis or satisfaction at impending judgment, but grief. For me, that image provides an important lens for reading other biblical depictions of divine anger, judgment, and suffering. or the anguish running through that same collection of Psalms.¹¹⛰ Side Trail: The Psalms are remarkably honest about experiences that polite religious conversation sometimes struggles to accommodate. Their prayers include anger, bewilderment, fear, accusation, and even words that sound uncomfortably close to despair. Psalm 13 asks how long God will seem absent; Psalm 88 ends without the reassuring resolution we might expect. I find something strangely comforting in that refusal to tidy everything up. These poems give people language for faith when confidence is thin and suffering is real. Reading them sacramentally needn’t mean finding a hidden answer. Sometimes it might mean discovering that lament itself can be a form of prayer. Such passages might become occasions of experiencing God’s own sorrow over a suffering world. Even troubling passages depicting violence or attributing disturbing actions to God could become occasions of lament rather than explanations I’m obligated to defend.¹²⛰ Side Trail: Some biblical passages attribute commands or actions to God that I find morally troubling, especially accounts involving warfare, collective punishment, or the destruction of entire communities. I used to feel pressure to reconcile each one with a perfectly consistent portrait of divine goodness. Historical study has made me more aware that these texts also reflect ancient ways of understanding violence, identity, and divine action. That doesn’t settle every theological question, but it changes how I approach them. Rather than defending every portrayal, I can acknowledge the difficulty, listen to those harmed by such interpretations, and read with Jesus’ life and teaching in view. I needn’t resolve every difficulty or assume every portrayal of God accurately reflects God’s character. I can sit with the grief these passages evoke, open to the possibility that God might meet me there.

And it’s that type of encounter I want to be careful not to lose sight of. I’ve spent years asking questions like “what does this mean?”, “what actually happened?”, “what can I learn about the world behind the text?”, etc. Those questions matter, and I don’t want to abandon them. But they can make reading feel like extracting information, as though learning is the only worthwhile outcome. Sacramental reading invites something else: attention. The kind of attention Christians have cultivated for centuries through practices like lectio divina, whereby a passage is slowly read and reread, its words quietly reflected upon, and whatever stands out allowed to linger.¹³⛰ Side Trail: Lectio divina, often translated as divine reading, is associated especially with the Christian monastic tradition, though attentive engagement with sacred texts has a much longer history. A common description involves reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation, not as a rigid formula but as movements of attention. A short passage might be read several times, with room for silence and reflection. The aim isn’t to decode secret messages or make every phrase personally relevant. What appeals to me is the invitation to slow down. It offers a different posture from the one I bring to research, where I can become so busy investigating words that I forget to sit with them. Maybe I sit with a familiar passage without reaching for a commentary. Maybe its words become a prayer, or maybe I simply remain still before them. Or maybe nothing particularly meaningful happens at all, which is okay too. The point isn’t to force God to speak through some spiritual technique as if it’s magic, but to become more attentive to God’s presence. To approach Scripture not only to better understand God, but to actually encounter the very God I’m seeking to understand.

Of course, this all inevitably directs my attention to the proverbial elephant in the room. For reading sacramentally may very well help nurture a particular type of experience, yet how do I know whether that experience is really of God? How do I know whether it’s ultimately due to the Spirit, to my subconscious, or (as Scrooge might have put it) to an undigested bit of beef? To be honest, I’m less confident than I once was that such questions have neat answers. But perhaps an experience needn’t be inexplicable to be sacred. Further still, if God can be encountered through ordinary things, why shouldn’t that include ordinary psychological phenomenon too? That doesn’t mean every experience deserves a divine explanation, and I’ve seen how easily “God told me” can become a way of baptizing my own assumptions, preferences, and desires with divine authority.¹⁴⛰ Side Trail: I have become increasingly cautious about claims that begin with ‘God told me,’ particularly when they leave little room for disagreement. Such language can be sincere, but sincerity doesn’t make an interpretation infallible. History offers plenty of examples of people appealing to divine approval for convictions that others later recognized as harmful. And on a smaller scale, I know how easy it is to mistake my preferences for moral clarity. This is why discernment matters. An experience can be meaningful without becoming a command, and a strong conviction can remain open to correction. Humility seems especially important whenever God’s name is invoked. As a result, whatever I think I’ve experienced must always remain open to reason, scholarship, community, lived experience, and especially the life and teachings of Jesus. Sometimes I may conclude that what I attributed to God was mostly me; other times I may simply not know.

But that’s not the only elephant in the room. For if God can be encountered through Scripture, music, literature, and countless other ways, then what makes Scripture uniquely sacred? Why return to these writings rather than seek God wherever I feel most moved? For me, it’s the classic Sunday School answer: Jesus. Because if I want to understand who he was, what he taught, how he lived, and why his earliest followers found him significant, these are the writings I must return to. They’re the foundational witness through which the Christian community has come to know him, wrestle with his significance, and understand what following him means. And that gives Scripture a distinctive place among the places through which I might encounter God. A song may draw me into worship, a friendship may comfort me, and literature may fill me with wonder, but Scripture provides the foundational witness to Jesus that helps shape my understanding of those experiences. Its testimony doesn’t eliminate discernment or settle every theological disagreement, but it gives my faith a particular center. Perhaps Scripture is sacred not because it’s the only place God can be encountered, but because of its foundational role in helping me recognize the God I’m hoping to encounter.

And perhaps that brings me to a question that has been quietly building throughout this series. After all, if Scripture is as thoroughly a human product as I’ve come to believe, if its authority ultimately points beyond itself to Jesus, and if its truthfulness and sacredness depend neither on historical accuracy nor divine authorship, what does that mean for my view of the Bible as a whole? I ask because, growing up, I often heard about the importance of having a “high view of Scripture.” It was, and still is, a familiar expression for holding the Bible in particularly high regard, and is usually associated with particular beliefs about its divine origin, inerrancy, infallibility, and authority, etc.¹⁵⛰ Side Trail: Even the phrase high view of Scripture isn’t as precise as it first sounds. Christians who all claim to honor the Bible may disagree about its historical reliability, the meaning of inspiration, the limits of its authority, or how to interpret difficult passages. Some emphasize inerrancy; others emphasize Scripture’s role in bearing witness to Christ or shaping the church’s life. Those differences matter, but the label itself can obscure them. I once treated high and low as if they were straightforward measurements. Looking back, I wonder how often those terms simply marked which assumptions a community considered essential, rather than explaining why those assumptions deserved acceptance. To question, let alone abandon, those beliefs was, almost by definition, to have a lower view of Scripture. And for a long time, I accepted that distinction without much thought. Yet as I’ve spent time rethinking those convictions, I’ve discovered something unexpected: letting go of my former beliefs about the Bible hasn’t diminished my appreciation for it. If anything, I’ve come to appreciate its richness, complexity, and significance in ways I never had before.

So where does that leave me? Have I simply traded a high view of Scripture for a lower one, or might there be more to the distinction than I once assumed? Perhaps it’s time to revisit a question I never thought to ask when I was younger: What does it even mean to have a high view of Scripture, anyways? And so that’s the question I hope to turn to next time.

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