If a verse was once used to keep you quiet, someone handing you a Bible can feel like being asked to trust the weapon. That question deserves a real answer: when this book was used to justify oppression or silence, why would anyone trust it? The answer offered here is that the wound usually came from a reading, and readings can be tested against the text. You do not have to accept that quickly. You can work through this guide alone over a few sittings or with a group in one or two meetings. Nobody has to tell their story to take part.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and Sherelle Ducksworth, a professor at Anderson University who teaches worldview, hermeneutics and theology. Ducksworth came to faith while studying sociology, race and feminism, so these questions were hers long before she answered anyone else’s.
Begin with the hurt
Many church responses start by protecting the Bible. They point out misreadings before anyone has said what happened to them. That order tells a hurt person the book matters more than they do. Ducksworth names the difficulty first:
So it’s hard to have a lived experience of oppression and kind of being invisible, but then going to the passage and seeing women of color who seem to be treated the same way.
She then adds what made it worse: “And then also seeing your clergy handling the text as if that invisibility is okay.” She has separated two injuries. One is the hard passage itself. The other is the leader who read it as though the harm were acceptable. Both are real, and they call for different responses.
Ducksworth also refuses the easy excuse for church history. When students ask whether Christians used the Bible to support slavery, she answers yes and calls it a misuse. She does not explain it away as people being products of their time. She says admitting the failure has helped people: “and I think that’s been a service to people to hear that people have messed up and there’s a better way to interpret.”
Sit with this first. Read Psalm 13:1 slowly: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” A complaint that blunt sits inside Scripture itself. Bringing your anger or distrust to the text is no betrayal of faith. The Psalms make room for it.
Scripture already knows this can happen
In Matthew 4, the devil tempts Jesus by quoting a psalm: “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee” (Matthew 4:6). The words are real Scripture, put to a twisted purpose.
Jesus answers: “Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (Matthew 4:7). He keeps the psalm and corrects its use with the wider witness of the rest of Scripture.
Jesus also confronts religious teachers who load people down in God’s name: “For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers” (Matthew 23:4). If your pain came from a leader like that, Jesus is not on that leader’s side in this passage.
None of this makes the hurt smaller. It locates the failure. In both scenes, the problem sits with the person handling the text, and the correction comes from the text read whole.
Where the failure actually was
Ducksworth’s central move is simple to state. She found she could trust the Bible, and she says what she had to take apart was something else: “It was people’s interpretation and practice that I needed to deconstruct.” The hard passages could stay. “I needed a better hermeneutic to interpret them.” A hermeneutic is a way of reading, the habits that carry you from words on a page to what they mean.
Her way of reading has a center. She reads hard passages in light of how Christ lived out Israel’s Scriptures. Because she holds that Jesus is the revelation of God, she concludes: “if something is written and it seems like it’s contradicting the person, then the contradiction is in the interpretation and not in the person”. That test could become a loophole, a way to dismiss any verse you dislike. What keeps it honest is that it asks how Jesus himself handled Scripture, as in Matthew 4, where he answered a misuse with more Scripture and deleted nothing.
Lisa Fields described a common mistake: people treat a human interpretation as though it carried the Bible’s authority, then decide the Bible cannot be trusted because someone misread it. Her conclusion: “We should not throw the Bible away just because somebody misused it.”
The objection that remains
Here is the strongest form of the challenge. Some wounds come from the texts themselves. Paul wrote, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). A skeptic can fairly ask why a trustworthy book would say that, and why a book this easy to misuse deserves trust at all. Ducksworth herself said she was afraid of the slavery passages for years.
One Christian response reads the verse within its unit. The same household instructions turn to the masters: “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him” (Ephesians 6:9). On this reading, Paul addresses believers inside a system they did not build and never commands anyone to create it. Many Christians find that persuasive. Some readers will not, and a group should let that stand. Saying the reading was wrong is a claim that has to be shown passage by passage, and a person who has been hurt may need time before examining a passage at all.
Hagar, and who was paying attention
Ducksworth named Hagar as one woman she did not know what to do with, and named how Hagar had been taught: “Hagar has been relatively just overlooked.” Hagar is an Egyptian enslaved woman in Abraham’s household, used to produce a child and then treated harshly.
Read Genesis 16:1-13. Genesis is narrative, and narrative often reports wrong without approving of it. The household treats Hagar as a means to an end. In the wilderness, she gives God a name: “Thou God seest me” (Genesis 16:13). Hagar is still sent back (Genesis 16:9), and readers have long struggled with that. A group should not hurry past that verse.
Look closely before you discuss. Go back through the passage with a pencil. Mark every verb where someone acts toward Hagar, and note who does it. Then mark every place where Hagar speaks. Whose voice does the narrator end on? Write down one thing the text notices that you were never taught.
When your own fear is in the room
This part asks something of the wounded reader too, and it needs care. Ducksworth recalled her years of fear: “I could remember like going through those passages and wanting to read what I needed to read.” She described how “we have these sources of trauma that we’re afraid that the Bible won’t liberate or won’t vindicate”.
Her counsel keeps the longing for justice and changes the method. She urged readers “to trust that God would do the liberative work without us having to like fix His word.” Early in her faith, she saw people press Gospel passages into arguments about women preaching. She personally believes the Gospels encourage women in ministry, a question on which faithful Christians land in different places. When she stopped forcing the text, she noticed that Jesus invited women into God’s family on their own footing. She found more freedom in the passage than in the argument she had wanted from it.
Lisa Fields reflected that “it’s very difficult for a traumatized mind to sometimes hold things in tension,” and warned, “when bitterness takes root in our heart, truth gets distorted in our mind.” She offered questions for self-examination: “where am I still holding bitterness? Where have I not processed trauma? Where am I holding resentment?”
Handle those questions gently. They are not a verdict on anyone’s pain, and they do not shift blame from the person who caused harm. The leader who misused Scripture is responsible for that misuse. The questions only recognize that every reader brings something to the page. For some people, working through that is a job for a trained counselor. Seeking that help is not a failure of faith.
A practice: the reading you were given, and the passage itself
Try this alone first. Give it about forty minutes, and stop whenever you need to.
- Choose one passage that was used against you or people you love. If that feels too close, choose one that simply troubles you. You can also choose not to do this yet.
- Write the reading you were given in one or two sentences. What were you told this passage meant for you?
- Read the whole chapter once without stopping. Then reread the verses just before and after.
- Write short answers. What kind of writing is this: story, law, poetry, letter? Who is speaking, and to whom? Does it describe something or command it?
- Ask Ducksworth’s two questions. Does the reading you were given fit how Jesus treated people? Does it force you to retell the story of redemption differently? She described testing outside claims this way and said, “And it’s been the Bible that has liberated me from that interpretation.”
- Write one sentence on where, if anywhere, the reading you were given departed from the passage. If you cannot tell, write that down. An honest “I don’t know yet” is a real result.
In a group, people can bring only step 6, or nothing at all. Do not ask anyone to name the person who hurt them.
You are not the first to read this way
Ducksworth noticed that no one had ever pointed her to Black believers who trusted Scripture, so she studied Black church history. She summarized what she kept finding:
The Bible is inspired. It is the word of God. It is true. You can trust it.
Why should that matter to a wounded reader? Ducksworth’s point was that for many of them, connecting it to justice, “it had to be true in order for their prophetic vision to be true.” People who suffered under these misreadings found in the same book the standard that condemned their oppressors. Their practice shows the abusive reading was never the only one available. The Bible itself supplied the means to expose it. Acts 17:11 commends readers who “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.”
Questions for discussion or reflection
- Think of an experience you know of where Scripture was used to hurt someone. Did more damage come from the passage itself or from how it was handled? Does separating the two help, or does it feel too neat?
- In Matthew 4:6-7, both the devil and Jesus appeal to it is written. What exactly is different about how each one uses Scripture?
- From your work in Genesis 16, what does the narrator let you see about Hagar that the household never sees? What still troubles you, and should it?
- Where could the test of reading through Jesus be misused to dismiss a passage you simply dislike? What keeps it honest?
- Is there a passage you need to mean one particular thing? What would it cost you if it meant something else, and what might you be missing because of that need?
- Which voices taught you to read the Bible? Whose voices were left out?
For whoever is leading
Say at the start that no one has to share, and mean it. Silence is participation. If someone says they cannot trust the Bible because of what was done to them, do not correct them in the moment. Listen. Never defend a reading that was used to harm someone in order to protect a church or a leader.
Sometimes a person will reveal that the harm is still happening, at home or in a congregation. Talk with them privately afterward. Put their safety first, and do not urge them to reconcile with the person harming them. If abuse or violence at home is involved, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. Encourage counseling where it would help. Prayer and professional care can go together.
The group does not need to settle every passage in one evening. Close by reading Psalm 13 aloud, all six verses, and let its last lines be heard after its first ones. The psalmist who asked how long God would hide his face is still talking to God at the end.