How To Study The Bible For Yourself
The short answer
Learning how to study the Bible for yourself begins with a deceptively simple discipline: noticing the difference between what the text actually says and what you assume it says. All of us come to Scripture carrying ideas we absorbed long before we opened the book—from our culture, our upbringing, even from centuries of tradition. Good self-study means holding those ideas loosely enough to test them against the words on the page.
The theologian Shirley Guthrie offers a vivid example. For centuries, Western Christians assumed that being made in the "image of God" meant the capacity to reason—an idea Guthrie traces back to ancient Greek thought rather than to the Bible itself. The Bible values thinking, he notes, but never says reason is what makes us human or godlike. That gap between assumption and text is exactly what careful reading is meant to expose. When you study on your own, one of your most useful questions is: where did I get this idea, and does the passage in front of me actually say it?
But this discipline should make you careful, not timid. Rowan Williams tells the story of Jürgen Moltmann, a German prisoner of war in Scotland in 1945, reeling from the revelation of his country's atrocities. Moltmann came to Christian faith simply by reading Mark's Gospel—no training, no preparation, no guide. Williams notes he is one of two major twentieth-century Christian voices who traced their faith to an unassisted encounter with that Gospel.
Put these two stories together and you have a method: read the text directly and trust that it can speak to you, while staying alert to the ideas you may be smuggling in. Self-study is both confident and humble—confident in Scripture's power to reach an ordinary reader, humble about the reader's own inherited categories.
What scholars say
Guthrie asks where our familiar definition of the "image of God" really comes from—Scripture or Greek philosophy—while Williams recounts how Jürgen Moltmann, a prisoner of war in 1945, came to faith simply by reading Mark's Gospel without any preparation. Together they show why reading the Bible for yourself calls for both suspicion of inherited ideas and trust in the text itself.
“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
In practice, this means two habits. First, read before you interpret. Sit with a passage—a chapter of Mark is a good place to start—and ask only what it says, before consulting anyone else. Moltmann's story suggests you don't need credentials for Scripture to reach you.
Second, keep a running list of your assumptions. When a familiar phrase like "image of God" appears, pause and ask whether your mental definition comes from the text or from somewhere else. You'll be surprised how often it's the latter. That small act of honesty is what turns reading into genuine study.
In context
These two excerpts come from different kinds of books, which is part of the point. Guthrie's passage sits in a survey of Christian doctrine, where he examines popular understandings of the "image of God"—a phrase rooted in Genesis 1, where God creates humanity "in his own image"—and asks which of them Scripture actually supports. Williams's passage comes from a set of Lenten reflections on Mark's Gospel, where he considers why this short, urgent Gospel has had such an outsized impact on readers who come to it with nothing but attention.