Dear Reader,

I get this question a lot, particularly on social media.  We all have Bible verses that we gravitate toward, and if we only look at a handful of verses, we can use them to justify anything we want, whether progressive or conservative.  Every person reading scripture automatically does interpretation because we never read the texts outside of our own experiences.  We all bring the lenses of our social location to every verse we read, and it’s only by being aware of our own biases that we can approach a text with a bit more detachment.

Even so, the Progressive Christian Movement approaches scriptural interpretation differently than fundamentalists.  Since fundamentalists believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, any verse can be used on its own because it came directly from God.  Unfortunately, fundamentalists often do not contextualize verses even within the text itself.  For instance, Leviticus is often used as a clobber passage against queer people. However, even without understanding the historical concerns of temple prostitution or inheritance law, the Levitical laws say that they only apply to the people of ancient Israel (and thus not to 21st-century Americans).

Progressives recognize that various people, in different contexts, over several centuries, wrote the books that make up the Bible.  We, therefore, look to scholarly criticism to help us determine what the texts mean.  For example, the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation tells us that we can’t fully understand a text without knowing what was happening in society when it was written.  For instance, in Psalm 137, the psalmist writes, “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (Psalm 137: 9, NRSV). The historical-critical method helps us recognize that this verse was written by a human being who was dealing with the ramifications of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the Exile of ancient Israelite leaders…put simply, those words aren’t from God!

Progressives look for the themes that guide the texts and allow those themes to shape our reading of the Bible.  There is a clear concern for those living on the margins and a constant call throughout both testaments to create peace through the presence of justice.  Progressives favor those texts because the context makes it clear peace through justice is the primary concern of the Bible.  These insights don’t erase the problematic texts in the Bible but give us the tools we need to deal with them.

Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines