How To Bible Study
The short answer
The heart of good Bible study is a single discipline: learning to tell the difference between what we bring to the text and what the text actually says. Every reader arrives with inherited ideas—things absorbed from culture, church tradition, or half-remembered sermons. These ideas aren't always wrong, but they aren't always biblical either, and the only way to find out is to hold each one up against the passage itself.
A famous example: for centuries, Western readers assumed that being made in the "image of God" (Genesis 1:27) meant the ability to reason. Why? Because Western culture, following the ancient Greeks, prized rationality above all else. It felt obvious. But as theologian Shirley Guthrie points out, the Bible never actually says this. Scripture doesn't disparage the intellect, but nowhere does it name reason as the key to our humanity. A whole civilization read its own values into the text and mistook them for the text's meaning. That's the trap careful study helps us avoid.
The complementary practice is simpler than it sounds: read whole books of the Bible straight through, before reaching for commentary or study notes. Rowan Williams tells of Jürgen Moltmann, a German prisoner of war in Scotland in 1945, reckoning with the atrocities his country had committed—who came to faith simply by reading Mark's Gospel with no particular preparation. The text itself did the work.
So a workable method for how to Bible study looks like this: first, read a whole book in one or two sittings and let it land on its own terms. Then, as you study closely, name your assumptions out loud and ask honestly whether the passage supports them. Commentary and tradition come after—as conversation partners, not as substitutes for the text.
What scholars say
Guthrie examines how Western Christianity long assumed the image of God meant rationality—a view he says the Bible itself nowhere suggests—while Williams recounts how Jürgen Moltmann, a prisoner of war in 1945, was among those whose faith began simply by reading Mark's Gospel without special preparation.
“We will look first at some of the more popular of these "inserted" views of the image of God and then at what most contemporary theologians believe the Bible itself means by it. Rationality? Western civilization in general has followed the ancient Greek belief that it is the capacity to reason that makes human beings human and like God. It is not surprising, then, that Western Christianity assumed for centuries that "image of God" means ability to reason and act in accordance with what is reasonable and rational. (Whatever you may think theoretically about this, did it occur to you to say "I am a rational animal" when asked who you are?) But although the Bible does not deny that we are thinking beings and shows no contempt for the intellect, nowhere does it suggest that this is the key to our humanity.”
“And yet, Mark’s Gospel still has, for all sorts of readers, an exceptional impact. Two of the foremost Christian communicators of the twentieth century – one of them happily still with us – have claimed that they owe their Christian faith simply to reading Mark without any particular preparation. The great German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann was a prisoner of war in Scotland in 1945; he and his fellow-prisoners had just been shown photographs of the horrors in the camps of Belsen and Buchenwald, and were dealing with the nightmare realization that they had been fighting for a regime responsible for unimagined atrocity.”
What it means for you
This week, pick one Gospel—Mark is the shortest—and read it straight through in a sitting or two, without notes or commentary. Just let it speak. Afterward, write down two or three things you've always believed the Bible teaches, and go looking for where it actually says them. Some beliefs will hold up; others may turn out to be cultural furniture you inherited without noticing. Neither result is a failure. Both are the point: you're learning to read Scripture rather than your own reflection in it, and that habit will change every study you do afterward.
In context
These two excerpts come from different kinds of books that converge on the same lesson. Guthrie's Christian Doctrine works through what the Bible means by the image of God, and along the way examines popular views that readers have inserted into the text—rationality being the classic case. Williams's Meeting God in Mark, a set of Lenten reflections, opens by noting the exceptional impact Mark's Gospel has had on readers who encountered it without preparation, including Moltmann in a POW camp in 1945. Together they model two halves of one method: test your assumptions, and let the text speak first.