Some people say that the revelation in Jesus can be accepted along with everything else biblical writers say. However, that view is implausible. There are biblical accounts of God doing things that just don’t fit with the kind of God Jesus talked about. There are teachings of Jesus about matters such as loving your enemies that don’t fit with the vengeance biblical writers sometimes represent as appropriate in responding to enemies. It is a futile task to treat all biblical teachings as being on the same level and think that you have to reconcile them into a single whole.

My parents told me that the biblical text wasn’t about all kinds of judgment; it meant not to judge whether someone else was saved. I don’t know where they got their answer. Most likely, it was something they had heard from a pastor. But it strikes me now as not only obviously wrong, but the kind of interpretation that lets us off the hook with regard to the teaching in question.

Defective habits of Bible reading are difficult to overcome, especially when they have been repeatedly supported by authority figures who told you what you were supposed to find. But one of the first steps to reading better is to ask yourself what interpretive key you are using. I think that the best place to look for such a key is in the teaching of Jesus.

In the churches where I grew up, citing what the Bible said on some topic was regarded as a claim to ultimate authority. It was taken for granted that the Bible couldn’t be wrong about anything, and it was assumed that determining what the Bible taught was relatively unproblematic. People knew, of course, that other Christian groups had different interpretations of what the Bible said, but among the churches I attended there was great confidence that where these other groups taught something different from what we said, they were wrong.

For many years I have been in churches that reject the idea of female subordination. In these churches there are two general approaches to dealing with biblical texts that might suggest otherwise. One is to argue that the hierarchical way of understanding things misconstrues what biblical authors were saying. Another is to claim that while biblical authors sometimes gave instructions that involved cultural assumptions about the place of women that reflected standard ways of thinking of the time, those assumptions should not be taken as divine requirements for us.

Christians from the earliest centuries who recognized that some biblical accounts were problematic tended to suggest that some accounts should not be understood literally, but should be taken as conveying allegorical meanings. Modern readers are generally not inclined to take this approach, but does that mean they have to acknowledge that God does terrible things?

Robert Brownson was a professor of New Testament who had taken what he calls a “moderate traditional position” on biblical teaching about same-sex sexuality. But his thinking on the topic was challenged when his eighteen-year-old son revealed that he thought he was gay. As Brownson considered his previous views in relation to a person he knew very well, those views came to seem to him shallow and unhelpful. In the end he wrote a book in which he did a major rethinking of biblical teaching about gender and sexuality.