Not Many Teachers
Teaching Scripture Should Never Become Casual
Luna has spent quite a bit of time learning from Yada. She has listened to him explain difficult passages, watched him connect verses to ideas he already believes, and gradually learned to ask a question that has become increasingly inconvenient for her teacher: Is that actually what the passage says? By the time she reaches James 3:1, she has learned enough about Scripture to recognize something Yada has not yet fully considered about teaching it.
“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.”
Luna’s response is simple: “Maybe I should just keep learning for a while.”
Yada agrees. Unfortunately, he agrees for entirely the wrong reason. He concludes that some Christians are simply meant to be learners and readers because, after all, “someone has to fill the pews.” Luna has not actually decided that she belongs to a lower class of Christianity while the spiritually mature people do the teaching. She has recognized something much healthier: there is value in learning before we attempt to teach, and there is no shame in admitting that we are not yet prepared to lead someone else through ground we are still trying to understand ourselves.
James’ warning deserves that kind of response. He does not tell Christians that teaching is forbidden, nor does he suggest that ignorance is somehow more spiritual than knowledge. Scripture repeatedly demonstrates the importance of faithful teachers. But James does something we desperately need before anyone steps behind a pulpit, opens a Bible study, starts a podcast, publishes an article, or simply assumes responsibility for explaining Scripture to someone else. He removes any possibility that teaching God’s Word should be approached casually.
Teachers will be judged with greater strictness.
That statement should carry some weight around here because this website teaches.
There would be an easy way to avoid saying that. We could hide behind words like writer, researcher, or Bible student and pretend that because there is no pulpit sitting in front of these articles, James is talking about somebody else. But when we open a passage of Scripture, explain what we believe it means, tell you why we believe it means that, and sometimes tell you why another interpretation is wrong, we are teaching. Putting the lesson on a website instead of delivering it from a church platform does not make the responsibility disappear.
That means every warning we have given throughout Misquoted eventually comes back around to us.
If we tell you to read verses in context, then we had better read them in context before explaining them to you. If we criticize someone for making Scripture say more than it says, we had better resist doing the same thing when a passage would be more convenient for our theology if it said just a little more. If we tell you to test teachers, then we cannot become offended when you test us. Open your Bible. Read the passages we cite. Look at what comes before and after them. Follow the author’s argument. If our explanation cannot survive that examination, the problem is not that you failed to trust your teacher.
The problem is that your teacher failed you.
James 3:1 does not frighten us away from teaching. But it does give us a reason to explain why we are willing to do it at all.
Why Teach at All?
If James warns that teachers will be judged with greater strictness, the obvious question is why anyone who takes that warning seriously would willingly teach. There is certainly a comfortable alternative. Study Scripture. Read everything you can find. Chase difficult questions as far as they will take you. Learn biblical history, theology, languages, and the arguments Christians have been having for centuries. Fill shelves with books, fill notebooks with observations, reach whatever conclusions you can defend, and then quietly keep most of it to yourself.
There is something deeply appealing about that option.
Teaching requires stepping out of the comfortable position of simply learning and saying to another person, “I believe I understand this well enough to help you understand it too.” There is an unavoidable vulnerability in that statement. It does not mean the teacher is claiming infallibility, but it does mean he is claiming some degree of competence. Pretending otherwise does not make the claim disappear. If I publish an article explaining a passage of Scripture, I am implicitly telling the reader that I believe I have done enough work to responsibly explain that passage.
Perhaps saying that sounds arrogant. It certainly can become arrogant. Knowledge can produce pride, and a person who discovers that others value his explanations can quickly begin valuing being heard more than he values being correct. But pretending we have no abilities at all is not necessarily humility. Scripture describes gifts and abilities as things entrusted to God’s people for the benefit of others. Paul writes that “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7), while Peter tells believers to use whatever gift they have received to serve one another as good stewards of God’s grace (1 Peter 4:10). A gift is not a declaration of the recipient’s importance. It is something he has been given to use.
One of the abilities we believe can be useful here is taking something complicated and making it understandable without making it false. Scripture contains passages that can be understood by a child, but it also contains arguments that require patience, historical questions that require research, words whose meaning deserves investigation, difficult connections between different portions of Scripture, and disagreements that cannot responsibly be dismissed with a clever sentence. Not every Christian has the time, interest, resources, or temperament to spend hours chasing all of those questions. Some of us actually enjoy doing it.
The need is not difficult to see. Christians regularly encounter verses detached from their context, theological conclusions repeated without their supporting arguments, traditions treated as though they were written directly into the text, and complicated questions reduced until the answer is simple primarily because everything difficult has been removed. Sometimes the people doing this are dishonest. Far more often, they are probably sincere. Yada has been useful throughout Misquoted precisely because he is usually sincere. He has general ideas about what Scripture teaches. Some of those ideas are even substantially correct. His recurring problem is that he has not always done enough work underneath them before turning around to teach somebody else.
That is where James’ warning becomes more than a reason to be nervous. It becomes a reason to work.
If God has given us an ability that can help meet a need we can plainly see, hiding that ability because teaching is uncomfortable would not necessarily be humility. At some point, we have to decide whether personal comfort is a sufficient reason to remain silent. For us, the answer has been no.
But saying yes to teaching does not make the discomfort disappear.
It tells us what to do with it.
We Teach Backwards
One of the ways we try to take that responsibility seriously is by teaching backwards. By that, we do not mean beginning at the end of a biblical book and working toward the beginning. We mean that the ground we teach should ordinarily be ground we have already crossed ourselves. We continue moving forward as students, learning and investigating questions we do not yet understand, but when we turn around to teach someone else, we try to teach from what is behind us rather than pretending to know the terrain still ahead.
There is a simple way to picture this. If I am going to teach someone how to swim in five feet of water, I would like to know that I can swim in ten. The person learning from me should not discover the limits of my ability while I am responsible for teaching him the basics. I need to have gone farther than I am asking him to go, encountered problems he has not encountered yet, and learned whether the instructions I am giving him still work once the water gets deeper.
Bible teaching should work much the same way. A teacher does not need exhaustive knowledge before saying anything; if that were the standard, nobody but God could teach. But there should ordinarily be considerably more understanding behind a lesson than appears in the lesson itself. Before reducing a difficult passage to three paragraphs, the teacher should know what was lost in the reduction. Before confidently presenting one interpretation, he should know what problems that interpretation has to answer. Before telling someone, “This is what Scripture teaches,” he should have traveled far enough into the subject to know whether the conclusion survives once the easy questions are exhausted.
That is why there are subjects we are comfortable teaching here and subjects we are still studying. We have completed our work through Song of Songs. That does not make our interpretation infallible, and further study may sharpen or correct conclusions we have reached, but we have walked through the book. We have encountered its difficult passages, considered its structure, wrestled with how its poetry should be understood, and reached conclusions we are prepared to explain and defend from the text.
Hebrews is different. We are still walking through it.
We can teach the ground we have already carefully covered, but there are portions of that book we have not yet worked through with the depth we expect of ourselves before presenting a finished study. We certainly have opinions about what lies ahead. We may even have strong theological convictions about many of those passages already. But an opinion we carried into a study is not the same thing as a conclusion that has survived the study. Until we have done that work, there is nothing embarrassing about saying, “We aren’t there yet.”
That distinction matters because one of the easiest ways to mishandle Scripture is to begin teaching while we are still discovering whether our conclusion works. We find an interpretation that seems persuasive, immediately turn around and present it confidently, and only later encounter the passage, historical detail, grammatical problem, or competing argument that should have changed what we said. Sometimes further study will correct us no matter how careful we are. Teachers remain fallible. But there is a difference between being wrong after doing responsible work and being wrong because we were too impatient to do it.
Yada repeatedly demonstrates the second problem. He usually knows something. His ideas rarely appear from nowhere. He has heard the sermons, learned the vocabulary, remembered the verses, and developed enough general understanding to recognize the subject. What he has not consistently done is travel far enough beyond that general understanding before deciding he is ready to explain it to Luna. He reaches the first plausible answer and starts teaching from there.
Responsible teaching requires the willingness to keep walking.
And sometimes it requires the discipline to look at the unexplored ground in front of us and simply remain silent until we have.
Simplicity Should Be the Product of Depth
One of the strange things about teaching is that the amount of work required to understand something and the amount of information necessary to explain it are often very different. A difficult passage may require hours of study before its central point can be explained in a few paragraphs. The reader does not necessarily need to see every step that produced the conclusion. The teacher does.
That distinction matters because simplicity can be produced in two very different ways. The first is simply not knowing very much. If I have never investigated the difficult questions surrounding a passage, it is remarkably easy to give a simple explanation of it. I do not have to account for problems I have never encountered. I do not have to distinguish my interpretation from alternatives I have never considered. I do not have to explain details I did not notice. My explanation may be wonderfully uncomplicated because my understanding is wonderfully incomplete.
The other kind of simplicity is much harder to achieve. It comes from going into the complexity rather than avoiding it. The teacher investigates the difficult questions, considers the alternatives, follows the argument, examines the relevant language and historical setting where necessary, and allows the evidence to challenge the conclusion he expected to reach. Only after doing that work does he begin asking what the person he is teaching actually needs in order to understand the passage faithfully.
Sometimes five hours of study produces five minutes of teaching.
Those other four hours and fifty-five minutes were not wasted.
They may be the reason the five minutes are trustworthy.
James 5 provides a useful example because it appeared at the very beginning of Misquoted. The passage speaks about someone who is sick, calling for the elders, prayer, anointing with oil, forgiveness, confession, restoration, and the effectiveness of righteous prayer before moving into Elijah as an example (James 5:13–18). There are questions beneath that passage that most Christians encountering sickness do not need to investigate before they can obey it. What does James mean by the particular words he uses for sickness and healing? How does this paragraph relate to the spiritual condition of the people James has addressed throughout the letter? Why are forgiveness and confession woven into the discussion? What role do the elders have? What is the significance of Elijah? How have Christians understood the relationship between physical healing and spiritual restoration in this passage?
If we are going to teach James 5, however, those questions matter to us.
We may spend hours working through them and eventually turn around and tell a Christian something considerably simpler: Yes, when someone is sick, pray for them. Care about their suffering. Ask God to heal them. But do not become so concerned with whether someone is temporarily delivered from sickness that you neglect the condition of the person who will eventually stand before God. A body that is healed today will still die someday. The eternal welfare of the person inhabiting that body matters infinitely more.
The person hearing that lesson does not need to retrace every step of the research before benefiting from it. That is part of what teaching is for. We went into the deeper water so that we could return and explain what matters without requiring everyone else to make the same journey first.
But the deeper work also protects the person we are teaching. Perhaps we entered James 5 expecting it to prove something it does not prove. Perhaps a word we thought meant one thing turns out to carry a broader range of meaning. Perhaps the surrounding argument places an emphasis somewhere we had never noticed. Perhaps an interpretation we have repeated for years cannot survive careful examination. If so, the hours spent studying have accomplished something far more valuable than giving us additional material for an article.
They stopped us from confidently teaching something we had not adequately understood.
Research that never appears in the finished lesson is therefore not wasted research. Sometimes it is the most important research we did.
The goal is not to show the reader how deep we can swim.
It is to have gone deep enough that when we return to the shallow water, we know where we are standing.
Five Hours Does Not Make Us Right
There is a danger in everything we have just said. If we are not careful, serious study can become its own claim to authority. We can begin measuring the reliability of an interpretation by the number of hours spent researching it, the number of books consulted, or the amount of technical information accumulated along the way. None of those things makes a teacher infallible.
We can spend five hours studying James 5 and still be wrong.
We can spend fifty.
The value of deeper study is not that effort eventually purchases certainty. It is that careful study gives our assumptions more opportunities to be challenged before we hand them to someone else. The more seriously we investigate a passage, the more chances we have to discover that something we believed does not fit the text. That only helps if we are willing to let the text win.
That willingness matters because research can be conducted dishonestly without a single source being falsified. We can begin with the conclusion we want and search until we find someone who agrees with us. We can spend enormous amounts of time collecting arguments for our position while giving opposing arguments only enough attention to dismiss them. We can investigate individual words until we find a possible definition that supports our theology while ignoring the meaning demanded by the sentence in which the word actually appears. We can accumulate enough information to make a weak interpretation sound impressive without ever allowing the evidence to seriously threaten it.
That is not the kind of depth we are interested in.
The point of going into ten feet of water is to discover whether we can actually swim there, not to spend five hours proving that the shallow end was right all along.
Sometimes deeper study should change our minds. In fact, if years of studying Scripture never force us to reconsider anything, we should probably ask whether we have actually been studying or merely becoming more sophisticated at defending what we already believed. None of us approaches the Bible without assumptions. We have theological systems, church backgrounds, favorite teachers, personal experiences, and conclusions we reached long before opening the passage currently in front of us. Those things do not automatically make us wrong, but neither do they deserve protection from the text.
That standard applies to everything published here.
The fact that an article required substantial research does not mean you are obligated to accept its conclusion. The fact that we can explain an interpretation confidently does not make the interpretation inspired. The fact that our name appears beneath the article certainly does not add anything to the authority of the words above it. Scripture possesses authority because it is God’s Word. Our explanation possesses value only to the extent that it faithfully explains that Word.
So check us.
If we cite a passage, read it. If we make an argument from the context, examine the context. If we say an interpretation does not work, consider whether we have represented that interpretation fairly. If we overlook something important, point it out. And if someone can demonstrate that we have gotten the text wrong, then the responsibility created by James 3:1 does not allow us to protect the mistake simply because correcting it would be embarrassing.
We correct it.
There is no victory in successfully defending our reputation while continuing to teach something false. The purpose of studying Scripture is not to become increasingly difficult to correct. It is to become increasingly willing to be corrected by Scripture.
The teacher does not need to be infallible.
He needs to remember who is.
Knowing When to Be Quiet
If careful study does not make us infallible, then part of responsible teaching is knowing where our study ends. There is a difference between having a thought about a subject and being prepared to teach that subject. There is a difference between believing an interpretation is probably correct and having examined it carefully enough that we are willing to place it before someone else as an explanation of what Scripture says.
That distinction requires a kind of silence that does not always come naturally.
We live in a culture that rewards immediate opinions. A question appears, and we are expected to have an answer. A controversy develops, and everyone is supposed to choose a position. A difficult passage comes up, and admitting that we have not studied it can feel strangely inadequate. For a teacher, that pressure can become even stronger. Once people begin looking to you for answers, “I don’t know” can start feeling like a failure to do your job.
Sometimes it is exactly the opposite.
“I don’t know” may be one of the most responsible things a teacher can say.
It does not mean we have no thoughts about the question. It may mean we have several. It may mean we know the major positions and presently lean strongly toward one of them. It may even mean we are fairly certain what the answer will eventually be. But if we have not yet done the work necessary to distinguish what we assume from what we can responsibly teach, there is nothing shameful about leaving the question open while we continue studying.
That is part of what we mean when we say we teach backwards. There is always ground in front of us. We are still students. We are still encountering passages we have not studied deeply, theological questions we have not satisfactorily resolved, historical issues we need to investigate, and arguments we have heard but have not yet adequately tested. We do not need to turn every stage of that process into a lesson for someone else.
There is actually something wonderfully comfortable about keeping it that way. If personal preference were the only consideration, there is a strong appeal in reading everything we can find, studying Scripture for the rest of our lives, accumulating whatever understanding God allows us to gain, and quietly keeping most of it in the corner. There is no audience to disappoint there. No article to correct. No public conclusion to reconsider. No possibility that someone will make a decision because we explained a passage badly. We can simply learn.
But comfort cannot be the only consideration.
If we believe God has given us an ability to take complicated things, understand how their pieces fit together, and explain them in a way that makes them accessible to other people, then there comes a point when remaining silent is not necessarily humility. Especially when we can see people struggling with the very things we are equipped to help them understand. Gifts are not given merely for the enjoyment of possessing them. They are entrusted to us so that they can be used in service to others.
That does not mean we speak about everything.
It means we learn where to speak.
On ground we have walked, we are willing to turn around and say, “Come here. Let me show you what I found.” On ground we are still exploring, we are perfectly comfortable saying, “I am still working through that. I don’t know enough yet to teach it responsibly.”
There is no contradiction between those statements. Together, they describe the posture we want to maintain.
Confidence where we have done the work.
Humility about the possibility that we are wrong.
And silence where we have not yet earned our own confidence.
James does not require teachers to know everything.
But his warning gives us very good reason not to pretend that we do.
The Teacher Should Still Be a Student
There is another danger that can appear once someone has studied long enough to become comfortable teaching. The teacher can slowly stop approaching Scripture as a student. Bible reading becomes preparation for the next lesson. Questions become opportunities to formulate answers. Difficult passages become problems to solve for someone else. Before long, the person who once opened Scripture asking, “What is God teaching me?” begins opening it primarily to determine what he is going to teach everyone else.
James leaves very little room for that posture. Immediately after warning that teachers will receive greater judgment, he writes, “For we all stumble in many ways” (James 3:2). Notice the pronoun. James does not stand outside the warning and point toward less competent teachers. He includes himself. We who teach will be judged with greater strictness, because we all stumble in many ways. The teacher remains one of the people who needs the Word he is teaching.
That should shape the way we study. Going deeper than the person we are teaching does not mean graduating beyond him spiritually. Knowing the historical setting of a passage, understanding its grammar, or having spent years studying theology does not make its commands less applicable to us. If anything, greater understanding should make it increasingly difficult to hide from what Scripture demands. The teacher explaining repentance must still repent. The teacher explaining humility must still be humbled. The teacher warning about careless words must still answer for his own.
And the teacher explaining James 3:1 had better notice that James 3:1 is talking about him.
This is one reason Luna’s response in the comic is healthier than Yada realizes. She has not concluded that learning is the consolation prize given to Christians who failed to qualify for teaching. She has discovered that being a learner is a good place to be. If she eventually teaches someone else, she should never really leave it.
The best teachers are not people who reached some theological finish line and turned around to instruct everyone who has not caught up. They are students who have traveled far enough along a particular stretch of road that they can help someone coming behind them while continuing to follow Christ themselves. They know some things well enough to teach confidently. They know other things well enough to recognize their complexity. And they know enough about themselves to realize that there will always be more to learn.
That posture also changes what correction means. If teaching becomes part of our identity in the wrong way, being corrected feels like losing something. We were the person with the answer, and now someone has demonstrated that our answer was wrong. Pride immediately begins looking for a defense.
A student has another option.
He can learn.
That should remain available to every Christian teacher for as long as he teaches. We can say something confidently today and discover tomorrow that we overlooked something. We can return to a passage we studied years ago and see an implication we missed. We can encounter an argument strong enough to force us to reconsider a position we thought was settled. When that happens, we do not have to choose between protecting our status as a teacher and following the truth.
We were supposed to be students all along.
The moment teaching makes us less willing to learn, we have misunderstood what teaching was for.
Not Everyone Needs to Teach
There is one more mistake hiding in Yada’s response to Luna. When she decides that perhaps she should continue learning for a while, Yada concludes that she has discovered her place. Some people teach. Other people learn and read. Someone, as he so graciously explains, has to fill the pews.
The joke works because it reflects an assumption that can quietly develop in Christian culture: teaching is a kind of spiritual promotion. You begin as the person sitting in the Bible study, then eventually become the person leading it. You listen to sermons until you know enough to preach them. You learn until you graduate into teaching. Under that model, remaining a learner can begin to feel like remaining permanently in the beginner class.
Scripture does not describe the Church that way.
Paul repeatedly describes the Church as one body composed of many members with different functions. “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them” (Romans 12:6). He makes the point even more forcefully in 1 Corinthians 12 by asking a series of questions whose expected answer is no: “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers?” (1 Corinthians 12:29). The diversity is intentional. God has not failed to mature the Christian who never becomes a recognized teacher.
That means there is nothing deficient about the believer who spends a lifetime learning Scripture without ever starting a ministry, publishing an article, leading a Bible study, or standing behind a pulpit. The Church does not consist of important Christians with microphones and everybody else waiting for the service to end. The person quietly growing in knowledge, loving his family, serving his church, encouraging other believers, working faithfully, praying, giving, showing hospitality, caring for people in need, and following Christ has not failed to advance to the next level of Christianity.
Someone really does have to fill the pews.
Yada just misunderstands what that means.
The people in the pews are not an audience assembled so that teachers have someone to teach. They are the Church. The teacher exists to serve them. Whatever knowledge, ability, training, or opportunity the teacher possesses does not elevate him above the people listening to him. It increases his responsibility toward them.
That completely reverses the usual temptation toward status. If God gives someone the ability to teach, the question is not, “How many people can I get to listen to me?” It is, “How can this ability benefit the people God has placed around me?” The gift creates a responsibility to serve, not a right to be heard.
And if teaching is not your particular responsibility, you do not need to manufacture a teaching ministry to prove that you have matured. Learn because knowing God is worth knowing. Read Scripture because it is God’s Word. Study difficult questions because truth is worth pursuing. Grow in wisdom because wisdom changes the way you live. Help other Christians in the ordinary ways Scripture gives all of us without assuming that every act of Christian maturity must eventually produce a platform.
Luna can keep learning.
Perhaps someday she will teach. Perhaps she will not.
Either way, continuing to learn is not standing still.
Greater Strictness
We can now return to the words that started the whole discussion. James does not merely say that teaching requires preparation. He gives a reason Christians should hesitate before assuming the role: “for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1).
The warning becomes even more striking when we continue reading. James immediately begins discussing the tongue. “For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man” (James 3:2). He compares the tongue to a bit capable of directing a horse and a small rudder capable of steering a large ship. Then the imagery becomes more severe. A small fire can set an entire forest ablaze. Something physically small can have consequences wildly disproportionate to its size.
That is particularly relevant to teachers because teaching is accomplished largely through words.
A sentence spoken from a pulpit can remain in someone’s mind for decades. An interpretation given to a new Christian can shape the way he reads hundreds of passages afterward. A theological claim can change the way someone understands God, salvation, suffering, prayer, marriage, money, the Church, or himself. A badly handled verse can frighten someone with something God never threatened, promise something God never promised, or place a burden on someone’s conscience that God never placed there.
Sometimes the teacher will never know what his words did.
That is part of what makes the responsibility uncomfortable. We cannot control everything another person does with something we teach, and James is not making teachers responsible for every possible misunderstanding of their words. But we are responsible for the care with which we use them. When we tell another Christian, “This is what Scripture says,” we are doing more than sharing an interesting opinion. We are attempting to explain the words of God.
That deserves more care than almost anything else we could say.
It also explains why good intentions are not enough. Yada has spent most of these comics demonstrating that for us. He is not trying to lead Luna away from Scripture. Usually he is trying to help. He has heard something, learned enough about it to form a general idea, and sincerely passes that idea along. His problem is not usually malice.
His problem is that sincerity cannot do the work of study.
A teacher can genuinely love God, genuinely love the people he teaches, genuinely believe what he is saying, and still teach something that is wrong. Greater strictness would mean very little if good motives were enough to remove the responsibility for careless words. James does not warn only dishonest teachers. He warns those who would become teachers.
That should sober anyone who teaches Scripture without making faithful teaching impossible. James himself teaches while writing the warning. The New Testament repeatedly commands qualified people to teach. The answer to the danger of the tongue is not to conclude that no one should ever use his tongue. The answer is to recognize what our words can do and govern them accordingly.
That is why preparation matters.
That is why context matters.
That is why saying “I don’t know” matters.
That is why correction matters.
That is why going deeper than the lesson matters.
And that is why the teacher never gets to treat another person’s trust casually.
When someone opens a Bible and listens while we explain it, he has entrusted us with something valuable. For however long he is listening, our words may influence what he believes God’s words mean.
James reminds us that God notices what we do with that trust.
The Same Standard Applies Here
After ten issues of Misquoted, it would be easy to leave the impression that this series exists because the problem is always somewhere else. Yada misunderstands the passage. Another teacher ignores the context. A popular saying gets treated as Scripture. A theological tradition supplies an answer before the text has been allowed to speak. We examine the mistake, explain the passage, and move along to the next one.
But there is no special category in James 3:1 for the teacher who runs a website devoted to correcting other teachers.
If anything, repeatedly telling other Christians that someone has mishandled Scripture gives us additional reason to examine our own work carefully. It would be remarkably easy to build an entire ministry around pointing out everyone else’s errors while becoming increasingly unable to recognize our own. We could become very skilled at spotting assumptions when they belong to someone else and remarkably protective of them when they belong to us.
That is not what we want this site to become.
We teach because we believe Scripture can be understood and because we believe we have something useful to contribute to that work. We are willing to make arguments, reach conclusions, and say plainly when we believe an interpretation does not fit the text. There is no virtue in pretending to be uncertain about something merely to sound humble. If five hours of study leave us convinced that a passage means something, we are going to tell you what we believe it means and show you why.
But we will also show you the passage.
That distinction matters. Our goal is not to make you dependent upon us for the answer. Ideally, the explanation should eventually make us less necessary. You should be able to follow the argument yourself, return to the text, see how the pieces fit together, and determine whether the conclusion follows. If the only reason an interpretation remains persuasive is because you trust the person who gave it to you, we have not taught you nearly enough.
This is one reason Misquoted has never really been about collecting embarrassing examples of Christians getting verses wrong. The larger purpose is to develop habits that eventually work without Yada, without an article, and without us. Read beyond the verse. Identify who is speaking. Ask who is being addressed. Follow the author’s argument. Pay attention to the kind of literature you are reading. Distinguish what the text says from the conclusions we draw from it. Compare Scripture with Scripture. Recognize when you do not know enough yet to reach a conclusion.
And apply all of that to what you read here.
If we quote one sentence and build an argument that disappears when you read the paragraph, reject our argument. If we represent another Christian’s position unfairly because doing so makes it easier to refute, call us on it. If we quietly change the meaning of a word because another definition better supports our theology, don’t let us get away with it. If we confidently teach something today and better evidence demonstrates tomorrow that we were wrong, expect us to correct it.
That is not an invitation to treat every interpretation as equally uncertain. Some things Scripture teaches clearly, and teachers should be willing to say so. Nor is it an attempt to protect ourselves in advance by saying, “We could be wrong about everything.” That kind of disclaimer can become another form of false humility. If we did not believe our conclusions were defensible, we should not be teaching them.
It is simply an acknowledgment of the difference between confidence and authority.
We can have confidence in our interpretation.
Scripture has authority.
Those two things should never be confused.
Perhaps that is the most important protection a teacher can maintain. The moment preserving our conclusion becomes more important than faithfully representing the text, teaching has begun serving the teacher rather than the people being taught. We should be willing to lose an argument, revise an article, abandon a cherished interpretation, or simply say, “I was wrong,” before we are willing to make Scripture carry something it does not say.
Because Misquoted would become a rather spectacular exercise in missing the point if, after ten issues of telling everyone else to read the verse carefully, we stopped doing it ourselves.
The Point of the Warning
James does not give his warning so that every capable teacher will close his Bible, cancel the lesson, and quietly disappear. James himself is teaching when he writes it. Scripture consistently recognizes teachers as gifts to the Church. The warning is not designed to eliminate teaching. It is designed to eliminate carelessness about teaching.
That distinction brings us back to Luna.
Her response to James 3:1 is healthy because she is willing to remain a student. She has learned enough to recognize that there are things she does not yet understand, and she does not feel compelled to turn every new thing she learns into something she immediately teaches. Yada interprets that as evidence that she belongs permanently in the pews. But the very caution he mistakes for disqualification may someday help make her a trustworthy teacher.
Yada has the opposite problem. He knows things. That has been important to the joke from the beginning. Misquoted would not work nearly as well if Yada simply knew nothing about the Bible. He usually recognizes the subject. He knows the Christian vocabulary. He remembers verses. He has theological categories and general ideas about how they fit together.
He simply keeps turning around too soon.
That is why the final panels of this comic may be the best summary of his problem we have produced. Yada has just listened to Luna read that teachers will receive greater judgment. Moments later, he notices Mika chewing a newspaper with a headline about war.
“Wars…”
Then comes the connection.
“…and rumors of wars.”
Luna knows what is happening before Mika does.
“Yada…”
But Yada has already found his next student.
“Mika, have you ever studied prophecy?”
“Nope!”
“Perfect.”
And off they go to study Revelation.
The joke is not that Yada is evil, stupid, or deliberately trying to mislead a puppy. He sincerely wants to teach her. He genuinely knows something about the subject. He has recognized a biblical phrase and connected it to something happening in the world. Somewhere underneath his excitement there may even be several legitimate biblical ideas waiting to be sorted out.
The problem is that Yada has not sorted them out yet.
And he is already teaching.
That is the difference we have been trying to draw throughout this article. Responsible teachers do not need exhaustive knowledge, but they should know more than the lesson they are giving. They should have encountered the difficult questions before their students do. They should know where their conclusions are strong, where they require qualification, and where they simply do not know. They should be willing to spend five hours producing five useful minutes and equally willing to spend five hours discovering that the lesson they intended to teach was wrong.
Then, when they have done the work, they should turn around and help.
That is why we are comfortable standing where we stand, even when standing here is considerably less comfortable than sitting quietly in the corner with a stack of books.
We believe teaching is something we can do well. We believe making complicated biblical and theological questions understandable is an ability God has given us that can serve other people. We can see a need for it. So we are going to use it.
That statement carries no claim to inspiration, special revelation, or immunity from error. It does not mean every conclusion published here is correct because we researched it carefully. It means we understand that if we are going to ask another person to trust us long enough to listen while we explain God’s Word, we owe that person our best effort before we open our mouths.
James 3:1 makes that responsibility uncomfortable.
Perhaps it should.
We would rather feel the weight of teaching and continue doing it carefully than become so comfortable with being teachers that the weight disappears.
So we will keep studying forward and teaching backward. We will teach confidently on ground we have walked, remain students everywhere we have not, correct ourselves when Scripture proves us wrong, and encourage you to check every step against the Word that stands above teacher and student alike.
Luna has learned that there is no shame in saying, “Maybe I should keep learning for a while.”
Yada still has some work to do.
Unfortunately for Mika, he has decided to do it while teaching her Revelation.
A Prayer
Heavenly Father,
Thank You for speaking. Thank You that You have not left us to discover You through speculation, impressions, or the wisdom of whoever happens to speak most confidently. You have given us Your Word, and You have given Your Church people who can read it, study it, teach it, and help one another understand what You have said.
Give us the humility to remain students.
When we teach, remind us that the words we handle belong to You. Keep us from treating Scripture casually simply because we have become familiar with it. Give us patience to study beyond the first answer that seems right, courage to follow the text when it challenges what we expected to find, and wisdom to recognize the difference between what we know, what we think, and what we have not yet understood.
Help us go deeper than the people we teach ever need to see. May the hours spent studying in private make the words spoken in public clearer, simpler, and more faithful. Keep us from using complexity to impress people, and keep us from producing simplicity through ignorance. Teach us enough to know what matters, enough to know what can safely be left out, and enough to recognize when we still have more work to do.
Give us the courage to say, “I don’t know.”
Give us even greater courage to say, “I was wrong.”
Protect us from becoming so attached to our conclusions, our theology, our reputation, or our role as teachers that defending ourselves becomes more important than submitting ourselves to Your Word. If something we teach is wrong, expose it. If an argument we make cannot survive the text, let it fail. We would rather lose an argument and gain a clearer understanding of Your truth than successfully defend something You never said.
And when You have given us something that can serve others, keep us from hiding behind comfort and calling it humility. If You have equipped us to teach, give us the willingness to teach. If You have equipped us to make difficult things understandable, help us use that ability faithfully. Let whatever gifts You have entrusted to us serve Your people rather than ourselves.
For everyone who reads what we write, give them discernment. May they never believe something merely because we said it. Send them back to Your Word. Let them test our arguments, examine our conclusions, and become better students of Scripture than they were before they found us. If the day comes when they no longer need our explanations because they have learned to carefully follow the text themselves, let us count that as success.
Keep James’ warning before us without allowing fear to silence what should be taught:
“Not many of you should become teachers.”
And when we do teach, never let us forget why.
We who teach will be judged with greater strictness.
May that truth make us neither proud nor afraid, but careful.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen.