The 10 Worst Ways to Misinterpret the Bible

These theological idols blind so many, leading to lies, pain, and death for even more.

This essay has been a long time coming: Really, it’s been 25 years in the making.

Or perhaps 33 years, if you want to jump back to my third grade year in the Los Altos United Methodist Church, when I first received my own Bible. Since then I've kept it with me, and now it sits within arm's reach, atop a pile of seven books on the subjects of Jewish mysticism, Catholic monasticism, and Hermetic ritual practice. On top of them is Catching the Big Fish—David Lynch's book on meditation and creativity—and Bonnie Goldberg's Room to Write, both of which I'm reading to inspire my writing on the three traditions listed above. My hand holding this same Bible even originally served as the logo for this publishing company.

I used to call myself a "Judeo-Christian mystic." This had been my religious descriptor of choice since at least 2010 or so, when I started writing more to describe how my theological views had shifted in the 10 years since I had grown "Sick of Christianity But Still in Love with Christ." That was the title of my provocative teenage essay announcing my angry break from Evangelicalism, literalism, and simplistic Bible reading writ large. However, now I’ve come to feel a need to specify this further, focusing to “Jewish-Catholic Hermeticist” to more clearly illustrate my sympathies. I’m not converting to Judaism or Catholicism, but rather drawing from their deep pools of wisdom and mysticism to inform my Bible reading and admittedly esoteric ritual practices.

The year following that essay—my junior year of high school, when I’d just gotten my driver's license at 16—I switched from the youth group with the Evangelical Billy Graham theology-inspired pastor, to the grown-up Bible study my dad had taken and recommended: Disciple 1. I believe he was in Disciple 3 or maybe 2 at the time (the 2000-2001 school year), This was an in-depth Bible study program that met on a weekly basis, Sunday evenings, for sessions that lasted three hours and included close scrutiny of the Biblical text, which required substantial reading each week.

It was an adult introduction to the Bible, far different than the children's version I'd learned at 12 and came to live zealously at 13, when I realized the implications of these Evangelical theologies: that most people were going to hell, and I had both the ability and responsibility to save them.

Thus, ever since I was 15, I've been reading the Bible through the lens of mature adult scholarship, while still maintaining faith in Jesus as divine, resurrected, and performing miracles. I still regard the Biblical text as “divinely inspired,” important for daily study, and largely true, to varying degrees, in the stories of the Old and New Testament. It's an endless debate about where to draw the line between reality and myth.

And here's the thing: I've been comfortable with this since age 16. I'm fine with sitting amidst the mystery and ambiguity of the complexity behind interpreting and understanding the Bible.

And I've been studying how to read the Bible like this since then. I'm now 41.

However, there are lots of people around, and many with huge social media followings or large platforms in the so-called “mega churches” and in online streaming (the televangelism of today) who locked in their beliefs at 5 or 6.

They think that "faith like a child" means believing in a child's literalism. It doesn't. It obviously doesn't. And centuries of scholarship within Jewish, Catholic, liberal Protestant, and my beloved Hermeticist tradition, which combines all three, demonstrate that. Are we to believe that Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas were intellectual children when it came to the Bible?

Today I am going to identify 10 of the huge Bible misinterpretation errors that fundamentalist Protestants (of both the far left and the far right) make.

Yes, this applies both to anarchist, leftist, pacifist Christian fundamentalists and also populist nationalist, Trumpist, far-right, imperialist Christian fundamentalists. The former species is much less numerous and "rarer in the wild," but I've "debated" with them. I prefer discussions instead, where we exchange ideas and try to learn from each other, rather than where we defend our positions while trying to perform for readers or viewers.

Debate is a performance, not a serious way to find truth.

Or is it?

Because 25 years of arguing with Protestant fundamentalists has taught me the huge shortcomings inherent in their interpretations of the Bible. I now understand how they think better than they do. I know how it works both from inside and out.

So I am now going to lay out 10 of these common problems that I've seen regularly, which, again, manifest with both far-left fundamentalists, and far-right fundamentalists. And understand: I am talking about both their theology and their politics—their simple-minded, extreme, FLAT-OUT WRONG, and DAMAGING thinking in turn fuels cruel public policies which have ruined lives and killed people.

“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind— and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.” — The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1

Rather than laying out the explanations in depth for each of the 10 points—I’ll do so in future essays drawing on examples and citing key instances of these misinterpretations in action—today I'm going to give you a "too long, don't want to read" summary naming these fallacies, simply so they can be considered in full together, as multiples of these tend to compound.

Here are the 10 idols of fundamentalist Protestant Bible misinterpretations summarized:

1. The Idol of the Plucked Verse: Pulling a single verse out of context in order to either justify a false idea or to obscure and make "mysterious" the obvious, explicit point that is clarified in the verses preceding, following, or both. So many Christians, on both the left and right, will chop out a single verse, ignoring the verses before and after, as well as ignoring historical and cultural contexts. This is sometimes referred to as the use of “clobber verses”—wherein someone pulls a verse out of the Bible and uses it as a weapon to enforce one’s ideology. But it happens in less overtly cruel contexts, too. I’ve seen so-called Christians yank out 2 Timothy 2:23 — “Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels.” — in order to shut down meaningful discussions. They pull out a Bible verse and chuck it at you to call you foolish and stupid. This is simply the definition of passive aggression. So many fake Christians love to do this. They won’t insult you directly. They’ll just throw an out-of-context Bible verse at you, revealing the hypocrite they truly are.

2. The Idol of Narcissism: When you think your emotional reaction to a verse or whatever pops in your head after reading it is actually God planting an idea in your head. This is the big problem with “devotional” Bible reading as opposed to “critical” study. The former is concerned with making the reader feel good; the latter is focused on finding the truth.

3. The Idol of Certainty: Reaching a "conclusion" about what a particular verse means and being closed to the possibility that you may be incorrect. This is what turns a whole lot of Bible discussions more into sermons and “debates” rather than open explorations of God. People come to a firm conclusion about what a passage means and then they construct (or embrace) a theology on top of that to guide their lives. But what happens if their understanding of a particular verse is demonstrated to be wrong? They have to revise their whole theology, change their lives in concrete ways, and then open the door to this scary question: “If I was wrong about this, then what else am I wrong about, too?”

4. The Idol of the Single Translation: There are many simplified and very commercial Bible versions, like The New Living translation, that have been demonstrated to be flawed or inaccurate. People in thrall to the idol of their favorite translation do not care when corrected. They fail to realize that proper, grown-up Bible interpretation requires considering multiple translations—and also going back to the original Greek or Hebrew, sometimes even drilling down to individual letters.

5. The Idol of Paul: In addition to their usual verse-plucking, many fundamentalists especially choose to yank verses of Paul's letters out of context, ignoring the principles of the Torah which should take precedence. These are Pauline Christian fundamentalists, as distinct from my approach of Jewish-Catholic Hermeticism, where these traditions come in that order. I’ve written about this distinction previously here. In its worst, most extreme forms, this turns into a hostility to Judaism or even outright antisemitism. This is known as “replacement theology” and regards Judaism as an evil religion built on lies, no better than any other non-Christian faith.

6. The Idol of Blindness to Modern Biblical Scholarship: Over the last 200 years, scholars made massive leaps forward in understanding the history of the Biblical periods, putting familiar Bible narratives in brand-new contexts. One of the most important of these is accepting that both Jesus and Paul were apocalypticists who believed the world would end in their lifetimes. (See video below) This is a newer way of understanding the Bible, and most Christians—especially the fundamentalists—haven't engaged with it, or if they have, it has been to try and refute everything … pitifully.

7. The Idol of Sola Scriptura: Too many Protestants have embraced the idea that the Bible is divinely inspired, anyone can interpret it, and thus all the history of previous Bible interpretation can be ignored. And totally forget the possibility that other texts in religious traditions could also be divinely inspired. That’s totally heretical and terrifying to the fundamentalist who needs a closed canon or else they can’t carve in stone their own theology.

8. The Idol of Literalism: No, everything in the Bible didn’t happen as it’s literally described. The Bible is not a newspaper. As mentioned, there is a scale in Biblical interpretation ranging from "this is historical fact and happened as written" to "this is just myth and has no factual basis in reality." The middle-ground position is where most adult Bible readers who aren't fundamentalists end up, because it's really tremendously obvious. There are two different creation narratives in there, for Christ’s sake. There are four different biographies of Jesus, and they have conflicting details which—while the fundamentalists try real hard (and some will likely attempt to do so in the comments), they can't resolve at all.

9. The Idol of Sexual Repression: Fundamentalists are almost always sexually repressed, obsessed, or screwed up in one way or another. Their communities have indoctrinated them to believe that lustful thoughts make Jesus feel pain, with the nails on the cross actually stabbing further into his arms. (BTW, who’s up for a rewatch of Mel Gibson's antisemitic, sadomasochistic snuff film “The Passion of the Christ?”) These hang-ups mutate people’s understanding of the Bible, leading them to obsess over the passages about sex while ignoring others.

10. The Idol of the Monolithic Bible: A whole lot of people want to think that the faith they have and the beliefs they defend zealously in social media comments are the same ideas about God that Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, Paul and all the apostles believed. But it isn't. We know that because the ideas about God evolve through the Bible. They don't all agree, and the depiction of God in them is not the same. When people say "The Bible says this," or "Jesus's teachings say this," then they are acting like there is unity in either of these things when most of the time—not always—there are pretty meaningful disagreements.

Those are my primary problems with how particularly Protestant fundamentalists (mostly) mangle the Bible, creating their own imaginary, idolatrous religions.

(In rare cases, those of other traditions find ways to do these things too, but it's mostly a Protestant problem: The fundamentalists largely can't be reasoned with, since much of this comes from them being so emotionally driven and thinking "with faith like a child.”)

In future pieces, I will go much further into depth with examples and arguments and facts which further back up the reasons why all of these idols need smashing.

Any other common Bible-interpretation errors that bug you, that I should include when I write more about this big problem?

---