If the Bible Can Be Understood, Why
Do Christians Disagree
At the end of the last chapter, we reached what I believe is a reasonable conclusion. The Bible can be understood. We certainly didn’t conclude that every passage is equally easy, nor did we suggest that every reader will always arrive at the correct interpretation. We simply asked whether the Bible is fundamentally understandable, and after considering the nature of communication, the challenges of time, language, culture, and the effort required of every careful reader, we concluded that those challenges do not make understanding impossible.
If that conclusion is correct, another question immediately presents itself.
Why, then, do Christians disagree?
That question deserves an honest answer because the disagreement is impossible to ignore. Walk into ten faithful churches and you will quickly discover that people who love Christ, believe the authority of Scripture, and sincerely desire to obey God do not always reach the same conclusions. Sometimes those disagreements concern relatively minor issues. Other times they concern doctrines that have divided churches for centuries. Simply pretending those disagreements don’t exist helps no one. They are real, and any book claiming to teach people how to read the Bible should be willing to explain why they exist.
Notice something important, however. The existence of disagreement does not, by itself, tell us where the problem lies. In any act of communication there are several possibilities. The speaker may have communicated poorly. The listener may have misunderstood. The listener may have brought assumptions to the conversation that distorted what was said.
Or perhaps the listener heard the message correctly but chose to reject it. The mere fact that two people disagree is not enough evidence to determine which of those possibilities is true. Before we can identify the problem, we have to investigate it.
That investigation begins much closer to home than most of us expect. Before we ever read our first chapter of Scripture, we have already spent years being taught how to think about it. Parents, pastors, Sunday school teachers, favorite authors, podcasts, study Bibles, Christian traditions, and even the culture we grew up in have all shaped our expectations. Some of those influences have undoubtedly been faithful and helpful. Others may have been incomplete or even mistaken. The point is not that these influences are necessarily bad. The point is that none of us approaches the Bible as a completely blank reader. Every one of us brings something with us when we open its pages.
If we are going to become better readers of Scripture, that is where we must begin—not by assuming we have no presuppositions, but by recognizing that we do. Only then can we honestly ask whether those assumptions help us hear what God has communicated or quietly persuade us to hear what we already expected Him to say.
At this point, you might be thinking, “So the solution is to get rid of all my presuppositions.”
I don’t think that’s possible.
In fact, I don’t even think that’s the goal.
Every person who opens the Bible brings assumptions to the text. An atheist does. A Muslim does. A Christian does. A pastor does. A seminary professor does. You do. I do. The question has never been whether we have presuppositions. The question is whether we are willing to examine them honestly.
That distinction is incredibly important because it changes the way we approach Bible study.
Suppose I tell you before we’ve ever opened the Scriptures, “I already know exactly what this passage means, and nothing could possibly change my mind.” At that point, I’m no longer investigating the text. I’m defending a conclusion. The Bible has become a witness for my position rather than the authority over my position.
We’ve all been guilty of that at one time or another.
I certainly have.
There have been passages I was convinced taught one thing because I had heard them explained that way for years. Then I slowed down. I read the surrounding context. I asked why the author wrote those words to those particular people. Sometimes I discovered my previous understanding was sound. Other times I had to admit that I had been reading my assumptions into the text instead of allowing the text to speak for itself.
I’ll be honest with you.
Changing your mind is uncomfortable.
Nobody enjoys discovering they’ve been wrong, especially if they’ve believed something for years or even taught it to other people. Our pride naturally resists correction. Yet if we truly believe that Scripture is God’s Word, then we should never be embarrassed when Scripture corrects us. We should be grateful. After all, our goal is not to be proven right. Our goal is to understand what God has actually communicated.
As we move through the rest of this book, I’m going to ask you to do something that I’ve had to do repeatedly myself.
Hold your conclusions with conviction, but hold yourself with humility.
Be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. If it confirms what you’ve always believed, wonderful. If it challenges something you’ve always assumed, don’t be afraid of that either. Truth has never been harmed by honest investigation, and neither has genuine faith.
Being corrected isn’t enjoyable.
At least it isn’t for me.
I have a tendency to take being wrong a little personally. My first reaction isn’t always, “Well, thank you for helping me see that.” Sometimes my attitude gets a little rough. I get annoyed with myself. I wonder how I missed something that now seems so obvious. I’m not proud of that reaction, but it’s honest.
Even so, I’ve become convinced that being willing to be wrong is one of the most important qualities a student of Scripture can possess.
Think about it for a moment. If it’s impossible for any of us to be right about everything, then sooner or later every one of us is going to discover that we’ve misunderstood a passage, accepted a tradition uncritically, or repeated something that simply isn’t true. The question isn’t whether that day will come. The question is what we’ll do when it arrives.
Will we defend our previous belief because it’s familiar?
Or will we allow the evidence to correct us?
A relatively minor example comes to mind. Many of us have heard the explanation of Jesus’ words about a rich man entering the kingdom of God. The story usually goes something like this: Jesus wasn’t referring to an actual needle. He was referring to a small gate in Jerusalem called “the Needle’s Eye.” A camel could pass through it, but only with great difficulty. Therefore, Jesus wasn’t saying it was impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom—only difficult.
It’s a clever explanation.
The only problem is that the evidence for it is remarkably thin.
When we examine the language, Jesus uses the ordinary word for a sewing or surgeon’s needle, not the name of a city gate. More importantly, there is no reliable historical evidence for such a gate existing in Jesus’ day. The explanation doesn’t begin appearing until many centuries later, becoming popular in the medieval period. It seems to have arisen as an attempt to soften the force of Jesus’ illustration rather than as an explanation grounded in the historical evidence.
Now, whether you’ve heard that explanation before isn’t really the point.
The point is this: once an idea becomes familiar, it can become very difficult to let it go. We repeat it because we’ve heard it from trusted teachers. Those teachers often heard it from trusted teachers before them. Before long, an explanation can become so common that few people ever stop to ask the simple question, “Is it actually true?”
That’s why this book keeps returning to the same principle.
We must always be willing to let evidence correct us.
Sometimes that evidence will confirm what we’ve always believed, and that’s encouraging. Other times it will expose an explanation we’ve repeated for years without ever examining it carefully. When that happens, our responsibility isn’t to defend the explanation. Our responsibility is to follow the truth, even if it means admitting we were wrong.
In the end, our loyalty is not to our favorite illustration, our favorite teacher, or even our own past conclusions.
Our loyalty is to what God has actually communicated.
So how does something like that happen?
I don’t think it’s usually because Christians are trying to deceive one another.
In fact, I think the opposite is often true. Most Christians who repeat an illustration, a story, or an interpretation are doing so because they trust the person they learned it from. A pastor they respect said it. A Bible study they attended taught it. A favorite author included it in a book. Over time, that explanation begins to feel as though it came from the text itself rather than from someone else’s interpretation of the text.
There is nothing wrong with learning from faithful teachers. God has given the Church pastors and teachers to equip His people, and I have benefited greatly from men who have devoted their lives to studying the Scriptures. Ignoring those who have gone before us would be both foolish and prideful.
The danger comes when we stop distinguishing between the Bible and what someone has said about the Bible.
Those are not the same thing.
Every sermon you’ve ever heard is an interpretation. Every commentary is an interpretation. Every study Bible note is an interpretation. Even this book becomes an interpretation whenever I begin explaining a passage of Scripture. That doesn’t make those things bad. It simply means they must never become substitutes for the text itself.
One of the healthiest habits I’ve tried to develop is asking a very simple question whenever I hear a claim about Scripture:
“Where do you see that in the text?”
Not, “Who said it?”
Not, “How many people believe it?”
Not, “Has my church always taught it?”
Simply, “Where do you see that?”
That question has saved me from accepting ideas that sounded convincing but couldn’t be demonstrated from the passage itself. Just as importantly, it has forced me to ask the same question of my own conclusions. If I can’t show why I believe something from the text, then perhaps I don’t believe it because Scripture teaches it. Perhaps I believe it because I’ve heard it repeated often enough that it simply feels true.
Asking that question requires humility because sometimes the answer is uncomfortable. Sometimes we discover that we’ve been defending an explanation instead of defending what the biblical author actually wrote. When that happens, we have a choice. We can protect our tradition, or we can allow God’s
Word to correct us.
For the Christian, that really isn’t much of a choice at all.
Over the years, I’ve noticed something that has become a bit of an alarm bell in my own mind whenever I’m studying Scripture. It’s not foolproof, but it has saved me from repeating more than a few ideas that sounded convincing until I actually opened my Bible.
Whenever someone introduces a new idea about a passage, I try to ask myself one simple question:
“Can I actually see that idea in the text?”
Not, “Can someone make an argument for it?”
Not, “Can I connect enough verses together to arrive there?”
Not even, “Does it sound reasonable?”
Simply, “Is that what the author is actually communicating?”
Those questions are not identical.
Sometimes you’ll discover that the explanation is right there on the page. The author’s point unfolds naturally as you read the surrounding verses, and you don’t have to force anything into the passage. Other times, however, you begin to notice that the explanation depends on filling in details the text never supplies. One assumption leads to another, another bridge is built, and before long you’re standing somewhere the passage itself never explicitly took you.
Think again about the rich young ruler. Is Jesus primarily saying that entering the kingdom is merely difficult for those who love wealth? Or is He exposing something much deeper— that a heart devoted to riches cannot simultaneously give God the place that belongs to Him alone? Those are not the same conclusion, and they don’t carry the same weight. One explanation tends to soften the force of Jesus’ words. The other allows His confrontation to stand exactly as it was spoken.
Now, I’m not asking you to settle that question here. We’ll learn later how to work through passages like this carefully and responsibly. For now, I simply want you to notice the process. Am I seeing what is actually written, or am I supplying pieces that must be added before my conclusion works?
I’ve found that asking that question over and over again has changed the way I read the Bible. It slows me down. It forces me to separate the words on the page from the explanation in my head. More often than not, that extra moment of reflection is enough to reveal whether I’m following the biblical author— or following an interpretation I’ve inherited.
One of the greatest enemies of careful Bible reading is familiarity.
That may sound strange because familiarity usually feels like an advantage. After all, if you’ve heard a passage preached a dozen times, memorized parts of it as a child, and discussed it in countless Bible studies, surely you know what it says.
Or do you?
The problem with familiarity is that it quietly convinces us we already know what we’re about to read. Instead of allowing the author to lead us through his argument, our minds race ahead to the conclusion we’ve heard for years. We finish sentences before we’ve actually read them. We supply details the author never included because we’re so accustomed to hearing the passage explained a certain way. Without realizing it, we stop reading and start remembering.
I’ve caught myself doing this more times than I care to admit. I’ll begin reading a familiar passage convinced I know exactly where it’s going. Then I’ll force myself to slow down and ask a simple question: “If I had never heard this passage preached before, what would I conclude from the words actually on the page?” That isn’t always an easy exercise because I can’t erase everything I’ve learned over the years. But I can become aware of how those previous lessons influence my reading.
This is one of the reasons I encourage people to read entire books of the Bible rather than isolated verses whenever possible. Context has a remarkable way of exposing assumptions. A verse that seems to say one thing when read by itself often becomes much clearer when it is read as part of the author’s complete argument. We will spend much more time talking about context later in this book, but for now I simply want to encourage you to slow down. Read patiently. Resist the temptation to rush toward a conclusion. Give the biblical author the opportunity to finish his thought before deciding what he meant.
That may not sound revolutionary, but I have found it to be one of the most transformative habits in my own study. Many of the mistakes I’ve made over the years weren’t the result of failing to read the Bible. They were the result of assuming I already knew what it said before I had actually listened to it.
If all of this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is.
The good news is that careful Bible reading is a skill, not a gift reserved for a select group of people. Like any skill, it improves with practice. The first time you consciously slow yourself down, pay attention to context, and ask whether an idea actually comes from the text, it will probably feel awkward. You’ll find yourself rereading paragraphs, checking surrounding verses, and resisting the urge to jump to conclusions. That’s perfectly normal. Every good habit feels unnatural at first because it replaces an old one.
One of the mistakes I made early on was believing that becoming a better reader meant collecting more information. I thought if I owned enough commentaries, watched enough debates, or listened to enough sermons, understanding would eventually take care of itself. Those things certainly have their place, and I still use them regularly. What I eventually realized, however, was that none of those resources could substitute for learning to observe the text carefully for myself. A commentary can tell me what another man thinks a passage means. It cannot do the work of reading the passage for me.
That’s one of the reasons this book is intentionally beginning with principles instead of doctrines. It would be much easier for me to jump straight into controversial passages and tell you what I think they mean. In fact, that would probably make for a more exciting book. But it wouldn’t accomplish my goal. If I simply hand you my conclusions, then you leave depending on me. If I can help you become a more careful reader of Scripture, then you’ll be able to evaluate not only my conclusions, but the conclusions of every teacher you encounter for the rest of your life.
That, more than anything else, is what I hope this book accomplishes. I want you to become increasingly confident in opening your Bible, reading it patiently, asking good questions of the text, and following the evidence wherever it leads. If we can accomplish that together, then the doctrinal discussions that come later won’t simply be my opinions laid out on a page. They’ll become opportunities for us to take the same tools we’ve developed together and put them to work on some of the most important questions Christians have wrestled with for centuries.
If I could leave you with one thought before we move on, it would be this: become comfortable asking questions of the text.
Notice I didn’t say become comfortable questioning the truthfulness of the text. Those are two very different things. I am convinced the Bible is true. Precisely because I believe that, I’m not afraid to ask difficult questions about what it means. If my understanding is correct, careful investigation will strengthen it. If my understanding is mistaken, then I want to know that too. Either way, I come out better than I was before.
That approach has changed the way I study the Scriptures. Instead of feeling threatened when someone challenges one of my conclusions, I’ve learned to ask them to show me where they see it in the text. Sometimes they can’t, and my confidence in my original conclusion grows. Other times they point out something I completely overlooked. Those conversations have been some of the most valuable teachers I’ve ever had because they forced me back into the Bible instead of leaving me satisfied with what I already thought I knew.
As Christians, I think we should become the easiest people in the world to correct—not because we enjoy being wrong, but because we love the truth more than we love being right. Those are not the same thing. Pride wants to win an argument. Faithfulness wants to understand what God has said. The two occasionally travel together, but when they part ways, the Christian should always choose faithfulness.
That brings us to the next step in our journey. We’ve established that the Bible can be understood. We’ve also seen that many of the disagreements between sincere believers arise not because God has failed to communicate, but because we all bring assumptions, traditions, and habits to the text. The obvious question now becomes this:
How do we begin reading in a way that allows the biblical authors to speak for themselves?
That is where we turn next.