I'm Learning to Let the Bible Breathe
reading the bible again for the first time
There may be spelling / grammar mistakes in my articles that make it through my editing, and that’s on purpose. I’m a recovering perfectionist (who was once VERY hard on himself) and one of the ways I’m learning to be compassionate on myself is by allowing mistakes to just … be.
Friends.
I’ve started to read my Bible again.
“Again?”
Yes. I recently stopped reading it for a long while just as I had stopped reading it for a long while about 9 years ago, shortly after Jordan was born.
9 years ago I began to realize how much I was struggling to read the Bible apart from the conservative narrative that I had grown up with. You know THAT narrative, don’t you?
It’s some variation of …
God created everything.
Adam and Eve sinned.
The “Fall” happened.
Everyone was born with a “sin nature”.
God hates sin.
God was mad.
Someone needed to pay for the sin.
God sent Jesus.
Jesus took my punishment.
Believe that, go to heaven when I do.
Don’t believe, go to hell when I die.
The End.
Even though I had begun to “deconstruct” and “rethink” what I believed regarding all of those things, I struggled SO. MUCH. to read the Bible through a different lens. No matter how many books, for example, I read regarding John 3:16 or how many books I read about alternate understandings of Revelation … I couldn’t read the Bible ANY other way than the ways in which I had been taught - God was ticked and unless I shape up and believe the right things, I’m headed for hell.
Sigh.
And so I closed my Bible and put it on my shelf where it sat for 6, 7, 8 months until one day I had the urge to pick it up and read it. And when I did? It was like the time away from it helped my mind and heart reset so that I could read it differently, through a different lens than I ever had before.
John 3:16.
Revelation.
The story of creation.
The birth and death of Jesus.
… it ALL looked so much different than it ever had before and I fell back in love with it again.
But.
Then?
As time went on … I don’t know; but a new shift began to take place inside of me where I realized that although I was no longer reading the Bible as a “conservative” I was now reading the Bible as a “progressive” - a shift that brought a lot of good, of course, but also a lot of the “same old, same old” in terms of …
“I’m reading the Bible better than THEY are.”
“My reading of the Bible is the RIGHT reading.”
“This is the RIGHT way to read the Bible.”
… and I started to realize that although my values had shifted from conservative to progressive, the energy with which I read the Bible remained exactly the same.
Just as I thought I was reading the Bible RIGHT as a conservative, I now thought I was reading it RIGHT as a progressive.
Instead of me and my conservative friends having the right reading, now me and my progressive friends had the right reading.
Instead of reading it through the beforementioned narrative, I was now reading it through a lens of social justice where I tried to make (if I’m being honest) every story and every passage address that topic.
Again:
WE were right.
EVERYONE else was wrong.
(Especially “those conservatives” or “those Christian nationalists”, etc.)
And so I tried to begin reading it differently. I read a book by Julia O’Brien called “Prophets Beyond Activism” (highly recommended, by the way, if you really wanna be challenged) where she sort of critiques the progressive tendency to read the stories of the prophets heavily through a lens of social justice when (in reality) they were addressing things relevant to their time and place that are (often times) far removed from modern day activism and social justice.
Phew.
I brought her on the podcast and remember ending the call feeling very “convicted” that I was commandeering Scripture as a progressive in the same ways I used to as a conservative - I was just using a new set of verses to back up a new set of values and principles, forcing them into the shiny new boxes that my side and my team and our gate keepers insisted were most important.
And.
So?
I put my Bible away again. That conversation took place back in October 2025 and I really haven’t picked up my Bible much since then.
Not because I don’t like the Bible.
Not because I don’t want to read it.
Not because I don’t find value in it.
BUT.
Because I struggled to read it any differently than I was taught to read it as a progressive thinker who has a heart for things like social justice that, I think, are really important … but maybe (perhaps) not as “all over the pages of the Bible” as I assumed they were.
The other day, though, I finished reading a book by Richard Beck called “The Book of Love: A Better Way to Read the Bible” where he shares how we all bring a hermeneutic to our reading of the Bible (like me bringing my hermeneutic of social justice) and that perhaps it’s possible to read it through a different hermeneutic or lens or prism, through a prism of love whereby we acknowledge that no matter how great of a love we can imagine - God’s love is infinitely greater, an acknowledgment that allows the Bible to breathe and expand in ways that it can’t really do when we stuff it into our pre-packaged understandings and assumptions (as good or thoughtful or righteous as those assumptions may be).
Yeah.
And so that got me to pick my Bible up again and I’m excited to say that I’m seeing things I never saw before, reading the Bible again as if I’m reading it for the first time.
Where will that lead?
Who knows!
More thoughts to come over the upcoming months and years, I’m sure, as this next leg of the journey is just beginning.
I highly recommend the book. You can pre-order it HERE, and my conversation with him will drop in June - don’t miss it.
Much love.
Glenn || SUPPORT / ART STUDIO
Thanks for sharing. Helpful. Beck’s book and Zahn’s book are the two books I look forward in reading in the near future.