How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

I’ve talked to several people who were from churches that teach the position that if you don’t hold this view, you are not taking God’s Word seriously. I couldn’t disagree more. It is because we take God’s Word seriously that we put effort into trying to understand the original context, culture, and to whom and why Genesis was originally written. It would be easier to just read these passages as if there is no difference between the time they were written and today, that God was addressing our need for scientific precision, but that would be poor application of the Bible study methods we have learned. We always need to consider the time it was written, to whom, and why. Deeper Bible study is not an excuse to doubt God’s Word. It is simply obeying what the Bible says when it tells each of us to be a worker “who correctly handles the word of truth.”* This means putting some effort into our study and going beyond a surface reading when needed.