Reading Backwards
How Christians Decide What the Bible Means Before They Open It
The Bible says what it says.
That sentence should be uncontroversial. It’s the kind of thing you’d say about any other book—a statement so obvious it barely qualifies as a claim. And yet, in practice, it turns out to be the single most contested proposition in the history of Western civilization. Entire theological traditions exist for the purpose of making the Bible say something other than what it says, or—more precisely—for determining which parts of what it says are the parts that count.
I don’t mean that the Bible is easy to read. Ancient Hebrew poetry does not map cleanly onto twenty-first-century English, and there are real scholarly disputes about specific words in specific contexts. The translation problem is genuine. But the difficulty I’m concerned with here is not a translation problem. It’s not even an interpretation problem, at least not in the way that phrase usually gets deployed. It’s the problem of what happens when a text says something you’ve already decided can’t be true.
Consider a thought experiment. Imagine you’ve never encountered Christianity. You know nothing about the religion, its history, or its internal debates. Someone hands you a Bible—both testaments, no study notes, no interpretive apparatus—and asks you to read it from beginning to end, then report back on what you found.
What would you find?
You would find a God who creates the world and then, within a handful of chapters, regrets the whole thing and drowns nearly everything alive. You would find Exodus and Leviticus prescribing death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath, for cursing your parents, for sleeping with the wrong person. Homosexuality is called an abomination—so is wearing mixed fabrics, though Christians have always been rather selective about which abominations keep them up at night. In Joshua, the protagonists slaughter entire cities down to the last infant, on the direct and explicit command of God, and the narrator does not flinch. The narrator celebrates it. A military leader in Judges promises God he will burn whatever comes out of his house if God grants him a win. God grants the win. His daughter walks out. He burns her. The narrator moves on. The book of Acts records God striking a husband and wife dead on the spot for lying about a real estate transaction. The early church, we are told, was greatly afraid. One can see why. Paul tells women to be silent in the assembly and slaves to obey their masters. In Revelation, the returning Christ treads the winepress of God’s fury, and the blood rises to the horses’ bridles.
And underneath all of it, the whole of creation groans under a curse it did nothing to deserve.
You would also find a number of passages that are simultaneously beautiful and morally substantial. The Sermon on the Mount. The book of Ruth. “The Lord is my shepherd.” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” These are real. I am not pretending they aren’t there, and I’m not interested in the version of this argument that ignores them.
But if you read the whole thing with an impartial eye—the way you would read any other ancient document, without a pre-existing theological framework telling you which passages reflect God’s “true” character and which reflect the limitations of the human authors—you would be unlikely to come away thinking this was a book about unconditional love. You would more likely come away thinking it was complicated, frequently violent, internally contradictory, and periodically hateful. You might not have the scholarly vocabulary to explain just why it reads that way—the centuries of composition, the competing authorial voices, the editorial layers, the geopolitical pressures. But you would notice the result. And the result does not look like a single, coherent moral vision.
But the question that lingers is what happens next. Because what happens next is where almost everyone struggles to be honest.
Broadly speaking, there are two common strategies for dealing with a sacred text that contains material you find morally repulsive.
The first: to insist that none of it is repulsive—that every passage, rightly understood, reflects the perfect will of a perfectly good God, and that if something looks barbaric to you, the deficiency is in your moral vision rather than in the text. This is the fundamentalist position. It requires you to accept that God had morally sufficient reasons for commanding the massacre of Canaanite children. It requires you to read Paul’s instructions about women not as first-century Mediterranean culture but as timeless created order. It requires, in short, that you never flinch—that you take the whole thing or leave it, because the moment you start sorting the text into the parts you accept and the parts that embarrass you, the system collapses. Whatever else I want to say about this position—and I want to say a great deal—it has the virtue of internal consistency. It is morally horrifying by any standard of human decency that postdates the Enlightenment. But on its own terms, it holds water.
The second strategy is more sophisticated, more popular among the kind of people who read Substack essays about theology, and—I will argue—less honest about what it is actually doing.
The argument goes roughly as follows: the Bible was written by humans who were inspired by God but also limited by their cultural context, and the task of the faithful reader is to discern the deeper spiritual truths beneath the historically conditioned surface. From this vantage point, the conquest narratives are not really about genocide. They’re about spiritual warfare, or about God’s faithfulness to covenant promises, or about the holiness required for Israel to be a light to the nations (the ones they didn’t destroy). Paul’s instructions about women aren’t prescriptive for all time; they’re pastoral responses to first-century situations in specific congregations. The Levitical death penalties aren’t really about stoning people—they are a pedagogical scaffolding, bound by their historical context, that pointed toward a system built on grace, now fulfilled in Christ and therefore no longer binding in their original form. You have heard some version of these arguments if you have spent any time at all in a mainline Protestant church or a progressive evangelical one. They are practically liturgical at this point.
I call this reading backwards. The conclusion comes first. The interpretation follows. And the more sophisticated the interpretation, the easier it is to miss the fact that the direction of reasoning has been reversed.
I want to be precise about my claim here, because there is a lazy version of this argument that I am not making.
I am not saying that all biblical interpretation is equally arbitrary. I am not saying that scholarship doesn’t matter, that historical context is irrelevant, or that any text can credibly be made to mean anything with sufficient ingenuity. Some readings of the Bible are more defensible than others by any reasonable standard of evidence and argumentation. The field of biblical studies is real, rigorous, and populated by serious people doing careful work. I am not dismissing it.
I should say, too, that I am not speaking from the outside here. I spent years inside this tradition—not as a casual participant but as someone who took the intellectual demands of it seriously. I hold a Master of Divinity. I have written defending the internal coherence of complex theological systems, working hard to make exactly the kinds of careful interpretive distinctions that serious hermeneutics requires. I know what it looks like when this work is done well, and I have striven to do it well myself. That experience is part of why I see the structural problem so clearly now—I’m not guessing in the dark about what the best version of the argument looks like. I have spent no small amount of time in the space where people are applying a great deal of effort to make the best version of the argument.
What I am arguing is that even the rigorous version of progressive biblical interpretation has the same structural problem as the lazy version. The progressive reader has already determined, before they sit down with the passage, which parts of the Bible are authoritative and which parts are historically conditioned—and they have made that determination using criteria that come from outside the Bible. The rigor of their subsequent analysis does not change the fact that the foundational move was not a textual one. You can build an extraordinarily sophisticated interpretive structure on top of that move. Many people have. But the foundation is not in the text. It is in the reader.
The criteria by which progressive Christians decide which parts of the Bible reflect God’s “true nature” and which parts reflect the “cultural limitations of the time” do not come from the Bible itself. They come from the reader’s prior moral commitments—commitments that were formed by the Enlightenment, by the long and often non-religious history of expanding moral concern to include people the Bible was perfectly comfortable excluding, by the secular philosophical tradition, and by the hard-won intuitions of a species that has spent the last three centuries slowly learning to take seriously the suffering of people it used to consider property.
This is no small point. This is the whole game.
When a progressive Christian reads the book of Joshua and concludes that God did not really command the slaughter of every man, woman, and child in Jericho, they are not arriving at that conclusion through careful engagement with the text. The text is explicit. God commands it. Joshua carries it out. The narrator celebrates it as an act of faithfulness. There is no internal signal—no authorial wink, no framing device, no editorial note in the margin—that suggests this passage should be read as allegory, metaphor, or cautionary tale. The progressive reader rejects the plain meaning because they have already determined, on moral grounds that have nothing to do with the passage in front of them—grounds they would probably describe as “the spirit of the text” or “the trajectory of scripture,” though those phrases are doing more concealment than revelation—that a good God would not order the massacre of children. And they are right. A good God wouldn’t. But the text doesn’t agree with them, and pretending otherwise requires the reader to perform an act of interpretive violence that parallels the literal violence described in the passage.
The pattern repeats everywhere you look. Paul says women should be silent in the assembly and offers a theological argument for why: the order of creation, the priority of Adam over Eve, a principle he presents not as culturally contingent but as cosmically grounded. The progressive reader says Paul was speaking to a specific situation in Corinth and his words should not be universalized. Maybe so. But Paul does not say that. Paul grounds his argument in Genesis, not in local custom. You can reject Paul’s reasoning—and I think you should—but you are rejecting it because you have already concluded, on grounds entirely external to Paul, that women are not subordinate to men. The moral conclusion came first. The hermeneutic followed.
Leviticus prescribes the death penalty for male homosexuality. Progressive Christians have developed several responses: the Hebrew word doesn’t mean what you think; the prohibition targeted temple prostitution, not loving same-sex relationships; the Old Testament law was fulfilled in Christ and no longer applies. These responses vary in plausibility, but they share a single structural feature: every one of them begins with the conclusion that homosexuality is morally acceptable and then works backward to reconcile that conclusion with a text that, on its face, calls it an abomination punishable by death. The moral reasoning preceded the textual interpretation. It did not emerge from it.
Let me be clear about where I stand, because this distinction matters. The moral reasoning is correct. LGBTQ+ people deserve full equality and dignity. Women are not subordinate to men. Genocide is an abomination regardless of who commands it. I am not making the fundamentalist’s argument on any of these questions. I am making a narrower, more uncomfortable argument: the progressive Christian arrives at the right answers despite the text, not because of it. And the refusal to say so plainly—to just admit that the Bible got these things wrong and that we know better now—is where the intellectual dishonesty begins.
There’s a way to test this. I’ll take it up next time.