The problem is usually not the Bible. It is the way the Bible was read. You can tell the difference by checking a reading against the passage itself, its setting and genre, and the life of Jesus. Sherelle Ducksworth teaches hermeneutics and theology at Anderson University, and she trained first in sociology. She makes that distinction the center of her answer. The passages used against Black people and women do not need to be cut out. They need to be read better, and a better reading exposes the misuse.
That claim needs to be shown, not just asserted. So this piece works through texts that have been turned into weapons and asks what each one says, to whom, and in what kind of writing. Where Ducksworth gives the reading, she is named. Where the reading comes from the passage itself and is offered here as support, that is said plainly. The piece also takes seriously the possibility that some abusers read the text correctly and the text is the problem.
Where does the problem actually sit?
Ducksworth came to this question honestly. As a young sociology instructor, she was asked one question more than any other once students learned she was a Christian: why follow a faith whose book was used to defend slavery? She admits the passages unsettled her too. Some of them, she says, seem to present women with texts that are oppressive and suppressive, and church history has often approved of that oppression.
Her way through was not to soften the passages. She drew a line between the text and what people did with it:
It was people’s interpretation and practice that I needed to deconstruct. So it wasn’t like I needed to throw away these passages. I needed a better hermeneutic to interpret them.
A hermeneutic is a method of interpretation, the habits that get a reader from words on a page to their meaning. Her point is that a reading is a human act, and human acts can be wrong. Lisa Fields put the same diagnosis bluntly: many people “take the interpretation as infallible” rather than the Bible itself, and then decide the Bible cannot be trusted because someone misread it. Fields compared Scripture to a hammer, built for building but capable of killing. Whether it builds or harms is “based on the hands and the intention of the person” who holds it.
A hammer, though, has no meaning of its own, and a text does. So “people misused it” only answers the question if the text can be shown to mean something different from the misuse. That has to be done one passage at a time.
What does Genesis do with Hagar and Leah?
Ducksworth names Hagar and Leah as passages she did not know what to do with. Hagar is an Egyptian slave woman given to Abraham to bear a child. Leah is married off by her father’s trick to a man who loves her sister. Ducksworth says Hagar in particular was mostly overlooked in the teaching she received, and she found someone speaking to Hagar’s experience only when she read Delores Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness. She concluded that whatever she had been told about the passage that excused the invisibility, “everything that they’re telling me about this passage has to be false.”
The text itself backs that instinct. Genesis is narrative, and narrative describes before it commands. It reports that Sarai dealt harshly with Hagar and that Hagar fled (Genesis 16:6). Reporting is not approving. The angel of the LORD finds Hagar in the wilderness, and she becomes the only person in Genesis who gives God a name: “And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me” (Genesis 16:13). The enslaved foreign woman, invisible to the household that used her, names God as the one who sees.
Leah’s story turns on the same verb. “And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb” (Genesis 29:31). The narrator does not pretend her marriage was fair. God’s attention goes to the woman her husband does not want.
These chapters are still not comfortable. Hagar is told to go back (Genesis 16:9), and readers have long wrestled with that instruction. But the passages do not teach that women of color are meant to go unseen. They show God seeing the women the household overlooked.
Do the slavery passages say what slaveholders claimed?
This is the hardest case, and the objection has real force here. Paul does write, “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 say the slaveholder read that verse correctly.
Ducksworth does not dodge this. When a student asks whether Christians used the Bible to support slavery, she says, “They sure did,” and then explains why it was wrong. She refuses the excuse that those people were simply products of their time. Her reason: “if I’m honest about people’s misuse, it makes me a more credible witness to the Bible’s trustworthiness.”
What follows is supporting reading from the passage and the wider canon, not Ducksworth’s own exegesis. Ephesians 6:5-9 is a household code, a section addressing people inside an existing first-century household arrangement, and it speaks to both sides. Four verses later: “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). The master is told he answers to a Lord who does not rank people by status. The passage addresses believers living inside a system. It never commands anyone to create one.
The law also speaks directly to how American chattel slavery began. “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 21:16). An economy built on kidnapping and selling people falls under that verse’s condemnation. A preacher who quoted Ephesians 6:5 to the people in his pews and never read them Exodus 21:16 was using part of the Bible against the rest of it.
This does not fully answer the objection. The letters contain no command to abolish slavery, and faithful readers still have to explain why Paul regulates rather than forbids. What the reading establishes is narrower: the texts do not teach the racial hierarchy American slavery depended on, and they do not authorize stealing people.
Why read every passage through Jesus?
Ducksworth’s own method gives the reading a center. She says the way she interprets “has to be in sync with the way he lived out the text.” When she reads a hard passage in Israel’s Scriptures, she asks how Christ engaged those Scriptures and what the new covenant he introduced says about that passage. Because Jesus is the revelation of God, she argues, “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 principle could become a loophole: call anything uncomfortable “not like Jesus” and set it aside. Ducksworth does not use it that way. It tells a reader where to look when an interpretation produces a Christ who would endorse cruelty, without permission to skip the verse.
Jesus himself offers one example of how a hard law can be placed rather than erased. Asked why Moses allowed divorce, he answers, “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). He keeps the Mosaic provision and explains that it accommodated a broken situation without expressing God’s design. Some Christian interpreters read the slavery regulations the same way, as limits placed on a fallen institution rather than a picture of what God wants. That is a proposal, not a settled conclusion. The two cases differ, and believers disagree about how far the comparison reaches. Its value is that it borrows a move Jesus actually makes, rather than a modern reader’s preference.
What happens when the reader needs a particular verdict?
Ducksworth turns the same scrutiny on readers who have been hurt, including herself. For a long time she was afraid of the slavery passages, unable to bear a conclusion that made chattel slavery acceptable. She remembers going through them “wanting to read what I needed to read.” Fear of a verdict pulled on her interpretation, just as interest pulled on the slaveholder’s.
Her example comes from the Gospels. As a new believer, she saw people press accounts like Jesus’ interaction with Mary into proof texts about women preaching. She herself believes the Gospels encourage women in ministry, a question on which faithful Christians land in different places. But as she read more carefully, she noticed something she had been rushing past. In that world, a person’s connection to the covenant community usually came through a family, through male headship. Jesus’ dealings with women invited them in directly. Her realization was that “women can be a part of the family of God on their own” without a man bringing them in.
Ducksworth says that for so long she wanted women to be liberated “that I was forcing the text to say things that were liberating” while “missing things that were really liberating.” Her counsel is to trust God to do the liberating work without bending his word to do it. The practical result for a reader is a discipline: when a reading feels freeing, check it against the whole passage before relying on it. A one-sided liberating reading can be as selective as the abusive one, and it can cause you to miss what the text actually gives.
A passage like Luke 10:38-42 shows what that kind of check can find. This reading is offered here, not by Ducksworth. When Martha wants Mary sent back to serving, Jesus answers, “Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42). Read alone, the scene can be stretched into a ruling on preaching. Read in its setting, it says something more certain: Jesus protects a woman’s place as a learner at his feet, in her own right.
Lisa Fields added that unprocessed trauma can push a mind toward black-and-white categories, while Scripture often asks readers to hold things in tension. Her line: “when bitterness takes root in our heart, truth gets distorted in our mind.” She was not dismissing anyone’s pain. The interpreter who wronged you was not reading neutrally, and a wounded reader may not be either.
Why does the “not from Adam” claim collapse?
Ducksworth’s sharpest example shows how close reading undoes abuse rather than requiring a smaller Bible. She encountered the claim, used in defense of slavery, that Black people descended from someone other than Adam and were not fully human. She went back to the text and asked, “Wait, how is that possible if Christ is a second Adam?”
Her logic follows Paul’s. “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). Christ answers that one man: “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). The gospel’s structure depends on one human family descended from one ancestor and redeemed by one Savior. If you change the family tree, you change the salvation. Ducksworth put it this way: “So if we’re from a different person, then there’s a whole nother gospel.”
She applies the same question to any outside claim about Scripture: “Does it cause you to have to rewrite the redemption story?” Fields pointed to Paul’s own standard for teachers who arrive with a new message: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). The question is not how authoritative the speaker seems but whether the message matches the gospel.
Ducksworth says that when outside voices have told her things about her Blackness or her womanhood, going back to the text is what freed her from those interpretations. Notice which texts did that work. The pro-slavery reading was refuted by Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, passages a person trimming the Bible would have no reason to cut and every reason to keep. Remove the hard passages and you lose some of the abuser’s material. Read the whole book closely and you find the answer to it.