The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

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“The right context for understanding the Bible is the context that produced the Bible.” (Page 16)

“But understanding Scripture isn’t about making it palatable or comfortable to modern readers. It’s about discerning what the biblical writer believed and was seeking to communicate to readers who thought the same way.” (Page 17)

“But you must remember that, while the Bible was written for us, it wasn’t written to us. What they wrote is still vital for our lives today, but we can only accurately discern the message if we let them speak as they spoke.” (Page 19)

“The biblical context includes its supernaturalism. The biblical writers believed in an active, animate spiritual world. That world was home to a lot more than the triune God, angels, Satan, and demons. It included other gods (i.e., the gods of the nations were not merely idols) and territorial spiritual beings that were not demons—and were, in fact, superior to demons.¹ It included what we think of as ghosts, who could appear visibly, and even physically, and communicate to the embodied living world of which they had once been a part (1 Sam 28:3–20). For the biblical writers, divine beings could eat, drink, fight, and produce offspring with humans (Gen 6:1–4; 18:1–8; 19:1–11; 32:22–32; Num 13:32–33; 2 Pet 2:4–10; Jude 6–7).” (Page 16)

“I’m suggesting that the path to real biblical understanding requires that we don’t make the Bible conform to our traditions, our prejudices, our personal crises, or our culture’s intellectual battles.” (Page 19)