Almost every Christian I know claims to believe exactly what the Bible says.

I don’t think that’s true.

That’s not because I believe they’re dishonest. Nor is it because I think they don’t love Scripture. Quite the opposite. Most of the Christians I know genuinely want to follow the Bible as faithfully as they can.

The problem is much simpler.

I don’t think it’s possible.

That might sound like a strange claim coming from someone who has spent years reading, studying, and writing about the Bible. But the more I’ve immersed myself in Scripture, the more convinced I’ve become that nobody simply “believes what the Bible says”.

Nobody.

Let me explain

The Moment You Open the Bible…

Imagine you open your Bible and read a command from the Old Testament.

How do you know whether it still applies today? Should Christians avoid eating pork? Observe the Sabbath on Saturday? Stone adulterers? Refrain from wearing clothing made from two kinds of fabric?

Most Christians answer those questions instinctively. We don’t even stop to think about them. Somehow, we know that some commands still apply while others belonged to ancient Israel.

But here’s the question.

How do you know?

The answer isn’t, “Because the Bible says so.” The answer is that you’ve already interpreted the Bible. You’ve considered who the command was written to, where it fits into the broader story of Scripture, how Jesus and the New Testament writers understood it, and whether it was intended to be universal or specific to a particular people at a particular time.

In other words, you’ve done theology.

The same thing happens every time we read the Bible. We constantly ask questions that the text itself doesn’t answer directly. Is this passage descriptive or prescriptive? Is this language literal or symbolic? Is this a timeless command or a culturally specific instruction? Should this verse be read on its own, or in light of everything else the Bible says?

None of that means we’re being unfaithful to Scripture.

It means we’re interpreting it.

And whether we realise it or not, every Christian does exactly the same thing.

We All Read the Bible Through a Lens

Here’s the part that many of us find difficult to admit.

None of us comes to the Bible as a blank slate.

Long before we read our first verse, we’ve already been shaped by our families, our churches, our culture, and our experiences. We’ve listened to sermons. We’ve read books. We’ve sung worship songs. We’ve heard trusted pastors explain what certain passages “really mean”. Some of us have been taught to read the Bible literally wherever possible. Others have been encouraged to look for symbolism and poetry. Some have been raised to trust church tradition, while others have been told to question almost everything.

We bring all of that with us every time we open the Bible.

That’s what I mean by a lens.

A lens doesn’t mean you’re trying to distort Scripture. Quite the opposite. It’s simply the collection of assumptions, experiences, and influences that help you make sense of what you’re reading. Without a lens, you couldn’t interpret anything at all.

For years, I was convinced that the Bible obviously taught all sorts of things. Then one day I discovered that what I thought was “the plain reading of Scripture” was often just the plain reading of the church I grew up in. It was a humbling moment. Rather embarrassing, really. It’s a bit like discovering that your family’s “secret spaghetti recipe” came from the back of a pasta sauce jar.

If you’ve spent any time in church, you’ve probably seen this happen. Two people read exactly the same passage and end up disagreeing about what it means. They’re both reading the same words. They’re both trying to honour God. Yet one notices something the other doesn’t, because each of them comes to the passage carrying a lifetime of experiences, teaching, and assumptions about how the Bible should be read.

That’s true of me.

It’s true of you.

And it’s true of every pastor, theologian, and Bible teacher you’ve ever listened to.

The goal, then, isn’t to find someone who reads the Bible without a lens. That person doesn’t exist. The goal is to become aware of the lens we’re already using. Because once we recognise that we’re interpreting Scripture rather than merely reading it, we become a little more humble, a little more curious, and a little more willing to ask whether we’ve been seeing everything the text has to offer.

So… How Do We Interpret the Bible Well?

If we’ve established that every Christian interprets the Bible, then the obvious question is this:

How do we do it well?

There isn’t a magic formula, but over the years I’ve found myself returning to a handful of principles again and again.

The first is to remember that every passage was written by someone, to someone, for a reason. Before asking what a verse means to me, I try to understand what it meant to the people who first heard it. Paul wasn’t writing to middle-class American Christians in the twenty-first century. Moses wasn’t speaking to a modern democracy. Jesus wasn’t answering questions about social media, dating apps, or artificial intelligence. Every biblical author wrote to real people, living in a particular place, at a particular moment in history, for a particular reason, and ignoring that world almost always leads to poor interpretation.

The second is to resist the temptation to read verses in isolation. Anyone who has ever received a coffee mug with Jeremiah 29:11 on it knows what I’m talking about here. One of the easiest ways to make the Bible say almost anything is to lift a single sentence out of its context. But every verse sits inside a paragraph. Every paragraph sits inside a chapter. Every chapter belongs to a book. And every book contributes to the larger story Scripture is telling. Context isn’t just important. It’s often the difference between understanding a passage and completely missing the author’s point.

Third, we need to recognise that not every part of the Bible is trying to do the same thing. We instinctively read a newspaper differently from a poem, and we read a recipe differently from a love letter. The Bible is no different. Proverbs aren’t promises. Parables aren’t historical accounts. Apocalyptic literature isn’t straightforward reportage. Poetry uses imagery that letters don’t. Reading every genre in exactly the same way is like reading Shakespeare as though it were an instruction manual.

Finally — and I think this may be the hardest lesson of all — we need to hold our conclusions with humility. That doesn’t mean we never arrive at convictions. It means we remember the difference between Scripture and our interpretation of Scripture. One is inspired. The other is our best attempt to understand it.

Ironically, I think that’s one of the healthiest ways to honour the Bible. We take it seriously enough to read it carefully, slowly, and humbly, always leaving open the possibility that we still have something to learn.

A Case Study in Biblical Interpretation

A few days ago, I published a tongue-in-cheek article titled An Exhaustive Summary of Everything the Bible Says About Premarital Sex.

The article consisted of… well… a blank page.

The joke, of course, wasn’t that the Bible has nothing to say about sexual ethics. It plainly does. My point was simply that the Bible never directly addresses the modern question of two unmarried people in a dating relationship deciding whether they should have sex.

The response was fascinating.

One reader left a long, thoughtful comment explaining why the Bible does, in fact, prohibit premarital sex. They cited passages from Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Paul’s letters, Hebrews, and Revelation. They explained arranged marriages in the ancient world, the purpose of Old Testament laws, and the meaning of terms like porneia.

It was an excellent comment.

But as I read it, I realised something.

It wasn’t disproving my point.

It was demonstrating it.

Notice what the reader had to do. They didn’t produce a single verse that said, “Two unmarried people in a committed dating relationship should not have sex.” Instead, they drew together a wide range of biblical texts, historical background, cultural context, and theological reasoning before arriving at a conclusion.

In other words, they interpreted the Bible.

To be clear, I’m not saying their conclusion was wrong. You may agree with it completely. That’s not the point. The point is that they reached that conclusion through interpretation rather than by quoting a single explicit teaching.

And that’s exactly what every Christian does.

Whether we’re talking about premarital sex, women in ministry, baptism, hell, divorce, or any number of other issues, we don’t simply repeat Bible verses. We weigh evidence. We connect passages. We consider context. We make theological judgements.

The mistake is pretending that our conclusion and the Bible itself are exactly the same thing.

The Most Honest Thing a Christian Can Say

If you’ve read this far, you might think I’m arguing that we should hold every belief loosely or that all interpretations are equally valid.

I’m not.

There are plenty of things I’m deeply convinced about. I’ve spent years studying the Bible, and there are passages I’d happily defend all day long. But I’ve also become increasingly aware of the difference between Scripture and my understanding of Scripture.

Those are not the same thing.

Throughout my life, I’ve heard Christians begin countless sentences with the words, “The Bible clearly says…”

Sometimes that’s true.

Other times, what follows isn’t a quotation from the Bible at all. It’s an interpretation. A thoughtful one, perhaps. A well-researched one. Maybe even the best interpretation available.

But an interpretation nonetheless.

I can’t help wondering how many of our conversations would change if we simply acknowledged that. Instead of saying, “The Bible clearly says…”, what if we said, “This is the conclusion I’ve reached” or, more honestly, “This is what my pastor has taught me”?

That isn’t a sign of weak faith.

It’s a sign that we’ve recognised the difference between God’s Word and ours and others’ attempts to understand it.

Ironically, I think that’s one of the highest views of Scripture we can have. It takes the Bible seriously enough to read it carefully, patiently, and with the humility to admit that we may not have exhausted everything it has to teach us. I think acknowledging that we’re interpreting Scripture doesn’t weaken the authority of the Bible. It limits the authority of our own opinions.

Perhaps the most faithful words a Christian can sometimes say aren’t “The Bible is clear.”

Perhaps they’re thinking, “I could be wrong.”

After all, the Bible is inspired.

My interpretation of it isn’t.