How to Read Yourself Out of the Bible
The most ordinary sin in Scripture is reading it for the exemption. I'd know — I've been doing it for years.
There is someone whom I have decided not to forgive.
I don’t say that the way you might expect — with heat, with a clenched jaw, with a story I’m itching to tell. I say it flatly, the way you’d report the weather. Because the truth is, I don’t think about him at all. I’ve gotten very good at not thinking about him. When someone brings his name up, I feel the irritation rise before anyone finishes the sentence, and I change the subject, and I go back to not thinking about him. That’s the whole of my relationship with him now. A practiced, deliberate forgetting.
I’ll spare you the full ledger, because the ledger isn’t the point.
You’ll have to forgive me for keeping the details at this high level moving forward. For many reasons, I’m intentionally being vague, because if I went into any further detail, then anyone with familiarity would instantly be transported into their place in this story.
The short version: years of addiction, and the theft that always rides shotgun with it. He stole from his family. He stole from strangers. He came, more than once, to my own door, for my own things. There was prison, and there was a long stretch of it. And there was the part of me — the honest part — that was relieved he was somewhere he couldn’t reach us. I had never resonated with the saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” more.
Then he got out, and within a breath, he’d taken something that wasn’t his, wrecked it, and wrecked himself in the process. He lives now in such a way where he won’t recover from it. He can’t fully see what he did. He can’t fully see much of anything.
And here’s the thing I have to tell you, because the whole article falls apart if I don’t.
That should have softened me. A man who can no longer grasp his own wreckage is a man you pity, not one you guard against. But it didn’t soften me. It gave me a better exit. He can’t even understand it now, I tell myself, so what would forgiveness even accomplish? I found, in his brokenness, one more reason to keep not thinking about him.
I know the text. I’ve taught the text. Peter comes to Jesus and asks how many times he has to forgive his brother — seven? — and he isn’t really asking a question. He’s asking for the cap, the number that lets him stop. Jesus takes the cap off. Then He tells a story about a man forgiven a debt he could never have repaid, who walks straight out the door and grabs a man who owes him pocket change by the throat (Matt 18:21–35).
I have always known which man I am in that parable. I just found a way to read myself out of it.
Here is my exit, and watch how respectable it is. I tell myself that when I repented, I meant it — and I don’t think he ever did. I’ve quietly appointed myself the judge of whether his sorrow was real, ruled that it wasn’t, and that ruling is what lets me off the hook. The servant in the parable owed a real debt. That’s the part I skip past. His debt wasn’t fake. It didn’t matter. The man forgiven everything had no standing to start weighing what he was owed — and neither, it turns out, do I.
I’m a trained theologian. I can spot this move in everyone else. I can watch someone take a verse that costs them too much, find the reading that quietly excuses them, and name exactly what they did. And I have a verse I’ve been doing it to for years.
I don’t think I’m the only one.
I don’t think my exit is unusual. I think it’s the most human thing about me.
Everyone reading this has a person. And underneath the person, everyone has a verse — a line of Scripture that would cost too much if it actually applied, so we’ve quietly arranged for it not to. We don’t tear the page out. We’re more sophisticated than that. We develop a reading. A context. A distinction fine enough that the text stays in the Bible but loses its grip on us.
We tell ourselves we don’t make enough to give much. The verse about generosity is for people with real margin, not for us, not right now. Maybe one day.
We decide the Great Commission was written for city people. All that talk of going and telling belongs to crowded places full of strangers; out here, where everyone already knows everyone, it doesn’t quite fit. The Great Commission, we’ve concluded, has a zip code.
And we’re living in a moment that has turned this instinct into a public project. There’s a loud, ongoing argument in the church right now over which of Scripture’s hard texts still bind us and which were written for a world we’ve since outgrown. You already know the argument I mean.
It’s very easy — I find it easy — to watch that argument from the stands and shake my head at how plainly someone is reading their way out of a verse that costs them something.
It’s easy, right up until you remember the person you don’t think about. And the verse you filed under surely not him.
Paul tells Timothy something that sounds, at first, like a throwaway line of encouragement. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16). We tend to read it as a verse about the Bible’s reliability. It’s more than that. Paul’s word for “all” is pasa — the whole of it. Not the parts that have aged well. Not the parts that flatter us. The whole. He isn’t handing Timothy a Bible with a tiered table of contents, some texts load-bearing and some decorative. He’s handing him a single book that binds all the way through.
Hold that next to what he says one verse earlier. The sacred writings, Paul says, are “able to make you wise for salvation” (2 Tim 3:15). The function of Scripture is not to confirm what you already want. It’s to make you wise, which assumes you weren’t wise to begin with, that the text knows something you don’t, that it’s going to tell you things you didn’t bring to it. A book that only ever agreed with you couldn’t make you wise. It could only make you confident.
So here is the real question underneath every conversation about a hard text. Not “what does this passage mean?” That’s the question we say out loud. The question we’re actually asking is, “Who decides whether this passage still has a claim on me?”
The move underneath the move
Watch how the relativizing of a costly text actually works, because the mechanics matter more than any single verse.
It almost never begins with “the Bible is wrong.” That move is too obvious; nobody who loves Scripture would make it. It begins with distance. The writers couldn’t have known what we know now. They were addressing their world, their categories, their limited frame — and our world is different, our knowledge fuller, our categories more humane. The text, on this account, isn’t wrong. It’s simply addressed to someone else. Binding then. Timebound now.
It’s a careful move, and it isn’t stupid. There’s a real and necessary discipline of distinguishing what transfers across covenants from what doesn’t. We don’t stone adulterers; we don’t keep kosher; we don’t sacrifice pigeons. The hard work of reading Scripture has always included asking how a text binds, not merely that it does. No serious reader denies this.
But notice what the relativizing move smuggles in. It dresses a whether question in the clothes of a how question. It isn’t asking, in good faith, “how does this text bind a Christian today?” It has already decided the answer is “it doesn’t,” and it’s reverse-engineering a hermeneutic that produces that verdict. And the tell — the thing that gives it away every time — is which texts get reclassified as timebound.
They’re always the costly ones.
No one builds an elaborate cultural-distance argument to get out of “love your neighbor.” No one discovers that “be quick to forgive” was addressed to a context we’ve happily outgrown. The hermeneutic of distance is applied with remarkable precision to the very texts that ask of us something we’d rather not give, and it leaves untouched the texts that comfort us. A reading method that only ever frees you from your own discomfort isn’t a reading method. It’s a mirror with verses around the edge.
Where it goes
The reason this is worth an article, not just a footnote, is that the move doesn’t stay where you first used it.
A hermeneutic is a habit, not a one-time exception. Once you’ve taught yourself that a text that presses on you can be reclassified as time-bound, you haven’t resolved one hard passage. You’ve installed a mechanism. And the mechanism doesn’t check what it’s dissolving. It’ll run on the divorce texts when your marriage gets hard. It’ll run on the money texts when generosity gets expensive. It’ll run on “love your enemies” when you finally have an enemy worth hating. You built it to get past one verse. It will happily get you past all of them.
This is the real cost, and it’s why centering the argument on any single issue misses the point. The cost is not one doctrine. It’s the principle that lets you keep all the others. You haven’t lost an argument about one chapter. You’ve quietly relocated final authority — moved it out of the text and into yourself, into your own sense of what’s humane and livable and current. And a Scripture that can’t tell you anything you didn’t already believe has stopped being able to make you wise. It can only make you confident in what you walked in with.
Reading the culture through Scripture
Here’s where I want to name what’s actually happening, because it’s the whole method of this newsletter.
The relativizing move is itself a hermeneutic — a way of reading. And the instinct of the moment is to evaluate Scripture through that hermeneutic: to ask whether the Bible’s hard texts survive the bar contemporary moral intuition has set. Redemptive Correlation runs the other direction. It doesn’t bring Scripture down to be judged at the bar of the cultural moment. It brings the cultural moment up for judgment at the bar of Scripture. The question isn’t whether the Bible passes our test. It’s what our test reveals about us when we hold it up to the Bible.
And Scripture has a story for exactly this. Run it through the arc.
In Creation, the Word isn’t a problem to be managed; it’s the thing that makes a world. God speaks, and there is light. The first lie in the garden isn’t “God does not exist.” It’s “Did God actually say?” (Gen 3:1) — a hermeneutical question, the first one ever asked, an invitation to put the Word on trial and let the creature decide which part still applied. The serpent didn’t deny the command. He relativized it. He opened the distance between the speaker and the hearer and let Eve fill the gap with her own judgment. The oldest sin in the world is reading God’s word, looking for the exemption.
In the Fall, that instinct hardens into reflex. We don’t generally reject the Word outright. We edit it. We keep the parts that fund the life we already wanted and quietly retire the parts that would cost us. Every one of us runs a canon-within-the-canon — a personal lectionary of verses we live by and verses we’ve decided were for someone else. The relativizing hermeneutic isn’t a strange new heresy. It’s the most ordinary sin in Scripture, performed with footnotes.
In Redemption, we meet the one man who refused to do it.
Hand Jesus a hermeneutical question designed to get someone off the hook, and watch what He does. The Pharisees come to Him about divorce — “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” (Matt 19:3). It’s a how does this text bind question, asked in bad faith, fishing for the loosest available reading.1 And His first move isn’t to answer it but to indict the way they’re reading. “Have you not read,” He says — the same formula He uses every time He means to tell His interrogators they’ve studied the Scriptures and still missed them (Matt 12:3, 5; 21:16, 42; 22:31).2 The accusation buried in the question is precise: you’ve been reading the law looking for the rule that lets you escape, when you should have been reading it for the purpose of God.3
Then He shows them how. He goes behind Moses, all the way to the beginning: “He who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matt 19:4–5), quoting the creation account as the first principle that the later legislation never overturned. When they push back — “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce?” (Matt 19:7) — He draws the distinction that is the whole hinge of the passage. There are two texts in front of them, and the difference between them is not that one is God’s word and the other merely human. Both are Scripture. The difference is purpose. Genesis states God’s positive design; Deuteronomy is a concession — divine condescension to human hardness, legislation for a world where the design has already been broken.4 “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matt 19:8).
Slow down on that distinction, because it’s the exact opposite of the move we’ve been tracing. The relativizing hermeneutic demotes a costly text — files it under time-bound, addressed-to-someone-else, no-longer-binding. Jesus demotes nothing. He honors every word as God’s and orders the texts by their purpose, letting the first principle govern the later concession.5 The relativizing move says the hard text has aged out. Jesus says you’ve read the texts in the wrong order — you started from the concession and never asked what was true from the beginning. One reading lightens the load by subtracting from Scripture. The other refuses to subtract anything and gets heavier: Jesus tightens precisely where He was invited to loosen.
And this reaches far past divorce. The will of God is found not in the legal provision that manages a situation already gone wrong, but in the most fundamental statement available of what God intended.6 Handed a chance to relativize a costly command, Jesus grounds the harder reading in Creation and won’t move. The serpent opened the distance and let the creature fill the gap. The Son closes the distance and puts the creature back under the Word. These aren’t subtle variations. They run in opposite directions.
So the weight of it is this: to adopt the relativizing hermeneutic is not, in the end, to disagree with Paul about one chapter. It’s to read Scripture in the manner Christ Himself refused to read it.
In Restoration, the Word that judges us now is the Word that will one day be vindicated entirely — “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Matt 24:35). Every text we tried to age out, every command we filed under timebound, every Did God actually say we whispered to get free of a verse that cost us — all of it stands, and stands as kindness, because the God who spoke it is more trustworthy than the self we were protecting from it. The Word doesn’t bind us to a cage. It binds us to a Person we can trust with the parts of us we were trying to keep.
So let me ask you the question I’ve been avoiding asking myself.
What’s your verse?
Not the doctrine you’d defend in an argument. Not the thing you’d say if someone tested whether you really believe the Bible. I mean the line of Scripture you have quietly arranged not to obey — the one you’ve surrounded with enough context and nuance that it can sit in your Bible without ever reaching your life. You have one. I’ve shown you mine.
Go find it. Not the comfortable verses you’ve under-applied out of laziness — those are real, but they’re not what I mean. I mean the one you’ve worked on. The one you built a reading for. The one where, if you’re honest, the interpretive labor was suspiciously well-aimed at the conclusion that costs you the least.
Here’s the test, and it’s the same one the whole argument runs on. Look at the texts you’ve decided don’t quite apply to you. Are they ever the cheap ones? Has the verse you reasoned your way out of ever — even once — been a verse that would’ve made your life easier to obey? Or are they always, every time, the costly ones?
Because if every text you’ve reclassified happens to be one that asked something of you, then you haven’t been interpreting. You’ve been negotiating. And you’ve been negotiating with a Book whose entire usefulness, Paul told Timothy, depends on its freedom to tell you what you did not already want to hear.
I’m not saying every hard feeling about a hard text is faithlessness. Some texts are genuinely difficult, and wrestling honestly with how a passage binds is the oldest and most honorable work of reading Scripture. That wrestling isn’t the problem.
The problem is the wrestling that has already decided who wins.
And the cost of winning that match is higher than the one verse you win it over. Every time you teach yourself that a costly text can be managed, you strengthen the muscle that manages the next one. You’re not resolving a difficulty. You’re training a reflex — and the reflex doesn’t stay where you left it. It’ll be there, fully formed, the next time obedience gets expensive. You’ll have taught yourself, in advance, how to get free.
So don’t ask whether your reading is clever. Mine was clever. Ask whether it’s aimed. Ask what it costs you. And ask who, exactly, ended up with the final say — the Word, or you.
I told you I wouldn’t tie this up, and I won’t. I still don’t think about him. As I write this, the verse and I are still at an impasse, and I’m the one refusing to move.
But I’ve stopped pretending the impasse is the Bible’s fault.
That’s the only honesty I can offer you, and I think it’s the honesty the whole thing turns on. A Word we can’t edit isn’t a cage. It only feels like one from inside the negotiation. Step back far enough, and you can see what it actually is: the one fixed thing in a life where everything else — our own judgment, what we find livable and humane and current — keeps shifting under us. A Bible that only ever told us what we already believed could keep us company. It could never make us wise. It certainly couldn’t save us, because salvation, by definition, is being rescued from where we already were.
The Word stands because the One who spoke it is more trustworthy than the self we keep trying to protect from it. That’s the promise underneath the hard texts and the easy ones alike — that heaven and earth will pass away before His words do, and that the parts of Scripture we most want to age out are held there, unmoving, by a God who can be trusted with the parts of us we were trying to keep out of His reach.
I don’t have my impasse resolved. Maybe you don’t either. But I’d rather sit at a hard text I can’t yet obey than win an argument against it — because the text isn’t my opponent. It’s the voice of the only One who has ever told me the truth about myself and stayed anyway.
So go find your verse. Don’t negotiate with it.
Sit down across from it, and let it do to you what it was breathed out to do.
This is the second piece in a June series on what it actually costs the church to relativize a hard text — one doctrine at a time, through the lens of Redemptive Correlation. The first looked at what happens when we lose judgment. This one is about what happens when we lose the authority to be told anything we didn't already believe. More to come.
A note: since I made you sit with something unresolved, I meant it. As of this morning, the impasse in my own story is still an impasse, and I'm still the one refusing to move. I didn't write this from the far side of having figured it out. I wrote it from inside the negotiation, hoping that naming the move out loud might be the first thing that loosens my grip on it. If you're somewhere similar, you're in good and ordinary company. That's not comfort. It's just true.
If this resonated, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to one person — not to the crowd, to one person you suspect has a verse of their own. This piece isn’t built to go viral. It’s built to be handed across a table.
If you’re new here: Theologetics is a weekly Monday essay for believers who hold the right doctrine and can’t always connect it to the hard parts of being alive — and for the ones who walked away because the church couldn’t. Reading culture through Scripture, one question at a time. Subscribe, and it lands in your inbox every Monday. Free, and staying that way.
And if you’ve been reading a while: something is coming on July 7 for the people who want to go deeper than a weekly essay can. I’ll say more at the end of the month. For now, just know the weekly will always be free — whatever else gets built around it.
The question reflects the first-century dispute between the schools of Shammai and Hillel over the grounds for divorce in Deut 24:1, the Hillelite position permitting divorce for nearly any cause; the Pharisees’ framing is designed as a test. See Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew, NAC 22 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992), 289–90.
R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 716. France notes the “Haven’t you read?” formula recurs at 12:3, 5; 21:16, 42; 22:31, each time confronting the hearers’ handling of texts they already know.
Daniel M. Doriani, “Matthew,” in Matthew–Luke, ed. Iain M. Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., and Jay Sklar, ESV Expository Commentary 8 (Wheaton: Crossway, 2021), 286: the rhetorical question “suggests that the Pharisees study Scripture improperly, looking for rules that permit them to escape an unwanted marriage instead of searching for God’s purposes for marriage.”
France, Matthew, 719–20. France argues explicitly against reading the Mosaic provision as a sub-divine or “merely human” deviation — “that would be a very modern inference” — since in first-century Judaism, the law of Moses was the law of God. The contrast Jesus draws “is not with regard to the authorship or authority of the two Pentateuchal texts… but with regard to their purpose.” Deuteronomy is “a mark of divine condescension” to human hardness of heart.
France, Matthew, 713–14: Jesus “finds within the Pentateuch two different levels of ethical instruction, in Deut 24:1–4 a pragmatic provision for dealing with a problem that has arisen, but in Gen 1–2 a positive statement of first principles,” and argues “that the original principle must take precedence over the later concession to human weakness.”
France, Matthew, 714: “ethical norms should be sought not in legal texts which deal with the situation where things have already gone wrong, but in the most fundamental statements available of the positive will of God for human behavior.” Cf. Doriani, “Matthew,” 287, on Jesus denying that “What is a just cause for divorce?” is even the right question.