How To Read The Bible
The short answer
Most of us learned to read the Bible the way we learned to solve word problems: find the point, write it down, move on. Barbara Brown Taylor describes this habit vividly—we treat a story as a kind of suitcase, something whose only job is to carry a meaning inside it. Once we've unpacked that meaning, we can fold it up, file it away, and never open the story again. It feels efficient. It also quietly ends the conversation between us and the text.
But the Bible's stories resist this treatment. They are full of characters who are hard to categorize, endings that don't resolve neatly, and details that seem to want something more from us than a summary. John Goldingay tells of a woman who grew up revering David and later felt indignant when she discovered how ambiguous a figure he actually is in Scripture. Her church had taught the Bible energetically—but it had packaged the Bible, told her what it said (or, as Goldingay puts it, what it thought the Bible said), rather than reading it with her.
So how do you read the Bible well? Start by staying inside the text longer than feels necessary. Read a passage more than once. Notice what's strange, what's unresolved, what doesn't fit the sermon version you remember. Resist the urge to reach for a conclusion in the first five minutes; the goal isn't to extract a message but to keep company with the story until it starts asking questions of you.
And read firsthand. Summaries, study notes, and preachers all have their place, but none of them can substitute for your own slow encounter with the words on the page. A story you've actually read can keep speaking to you. A story you've only had explained to you tends to stay shut.
What scholars say
Both scholars name the same problem from different angles: Taylor describes our habit of treating a Bible story as a suitcase for a hidden message we unpack and file away, while Goldingay recounts how a church that packaged the Bible's teaching—telling people what it said rather than reading it with them—left one woman feeling the complexity of David had been hidden from her.
“I am not sure where we got this idea, but it seems to dominate the way many of us read the Bible. Give us a passage of Scripture and we will put on our thinking caps, doing our best to decipher the symbols, read between the lines, and come up with the encoded message that Jesus or Luke or God has hidden in the passage for us to find. The idea seems to be that the story itself is chiefly a suitcase for conveying the meaning inside of it. Discern the content of the story and you do not have to go rummaging around inside of it every time it comes up. Instead, you can pull the meaning out of it and place it neatly folded in a file where you can find it the next time you need it.”
“She was indignant that she had been brought up to revere David as the man after God’s heart and that the ambiguity of his character had been concealed from her. That had been possible because she belonged to a church that paid great attention to teaching people the Bible and preaching from the Bible but that packaged the Bible’s teaching, and did so selectively. It did not read the Bible with people; it told them what the Bible said (except that it did not do so; it told them what it thought the Bible said, or what the Bible should have said). As a church that honored the Reformation, with terrible irony it did what the Reformation faulted the church of its day for doing. I commented that as she is now in the position of being a teacher in a church, she needs to avoid the same practice.”
What it means for you
Try this with your next passage: read it twice before deciding what it means. On the first pass, just follow the story. On the second, write down one thing that puzzles or unsettles you—and let it stay unsettled for a while. If you teach or lead others, resist the temptation to hand them conclusions. Read the text with them instead, and let them see the rough edges you see. The discomfort of an ambiguous David is not a problem to be managed; it's an invitation to keep reading. A Bible you're still wrestling with is a Bible that's still open.
In context
These two reflections come from different corners of scholarship but converge on the same concern. Taylor is describing a pattern she sees in how many readers approach any passage of Scripture—hunting for an encoded message rather than dwelling in the story. Goldingay's comment appears in his accessible commentary on Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, prompted by a conversation with a woman who felt the ambiguity of David's character had been concealed from her by a church that taught the Bible without reading it alongside people.